LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 

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Shelf ^2..^-^ 



UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



> 



PERSONAL CREEDS 



HOW TO FORM A WORKING-THEORY 
OF LIFE 



"V 

NEWMAN SMYTH 



7 



(. 



-3 



** And simple trust can find Thy ways 
We miss with chart of creeds " 

Whittier 




NEW YORK 
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 






The Librao 
OF Congress 



WASHINGTON 



COPYRIGHT, 1890, 
BY CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS. 



PREFACE, 

These eight discourses concerning per- 
sonal creeds grew together from one idea. 
As a single cluster ivhich has ripened upon 
a fruitful principle of faith,, they are 
offered in this hook to the larger public, 
with the hope that they may reach those 
men,, of ivhom there are many in these 
times,, who cannot believe everything that 
they have been taught,, hut ivho ivoidd not 
miss the best faiths tvhich are implied in 

mans truest life. 

N. S. 

Xeio Haven, Conn., April, 1890. 



CONTENTS. 



CHAPTER PAGE 

I. MORAL BEGINNINGS , . 3 

II. IN PERSONAL TOUCH WITH CHRIST ... 29 

III. NEARER ENDS OF HEAVENLY TRUTHS . . 53 

IV. GOD IN OUR LIVES 79 

V. HUMAN FORGIVENESS A 3IEASURE FOR THE 

DIVINE 101 

VI. JESUS' ARGUMENT FOR IMMORTALITY . . 127 

VII. PRACTICAL VIEAVS OF FUTURE RETRIBU- 
TION 153 

VIII. POINTS OF CONTACT BETWEEN THIS LIFE 

AND THE NEXT 183 



I. 

MORAL BEGINNINGS. 



But him that is loeak in faith receive ye, yet not to 
doubtful disputations. — Romans xiv. 1. 



I. 

MOEAL BEGINNrnGS. 

HOW to form a personal creed? I do 
not have in mind the formulation of 
a church creed. One whole denomination, 
indeed, is now engaged with that question ; 
for the Divine Providence — nothing less 
than Providence — has finally brought the 
Presbyterian Church in this country to 
earnest and truthful dealing with its Con- 
fession, and the religious problem now be- 
fore that denomination is the revision of 
its creed. It is not, however, concerning 
the formation or the reformation of the 
creed of a denomination of Christians of 
which I wish now to speak ; rather, I am 
thinking of the way in which a man may 
seek to grow into some faith which shall 
be his real personal creed. 

Neither Avill my subject permit me to be 
directly concerned with that other provi- 

3 



4 PERSONAL CREEDS. 

dential task which is gaining i^cognition 
in all chiu'ches among thoughtful Cluis- 
tian men ; viz., how shall our different con- 
fessions be so thoroughly sifted and ^vin- 
nowed that there may be left as the pure 
result some general or ecumenical creed 
for all the Protestant communions? Xot 
long since, a conference between certain 
eminent chiuThmen and non-conformists 
was held in England for this puipose of 
finding out and stating simply and clearly 
in what amcles of faith they agreed^ and 
in what they disagreed. But I would turn, 
in these chscoui^es, fi^om tliis large, distant 
prospect of church unity, or only glance at 
moments A\dstfiilly away towards it, while 
I concentrate our attention mainly upon 
this near, pei^onal concern, how can one 
of us form his personal creed for life and 
death ? 

Tliis subject should l>e discriminated, 
also, from another matter ^^ith wliich it is 
too often confused, but which is quite dif- 
ferent, although it lies not far from it ; viz., 
how can a man gain coiTect religious opin- 
ions, or become the possessor of an enlight- 



MORAL BEGIKNIKGS. 5 

enecl theological intelligence ? To one who 
reverences Biblical scholarship, and whose 
reading has carried him largely outside of 
any provincial theology, there may come 
at times the temj)tation to speak some 
severe things concerning the theological 
ignorance, mounting often to intolerance, 
of such dogmatists as are happily character- 
ized in these words of an apostle : "- Desir- 
ing to be teachers of the law, though they 
understand neither what they say, nor 
whereof they confidently affirm." But 
leaving such words as better unsaid, or 
reserving them only for occasions when 
regard for the rights and liberties of the 
faith of others makes it the Christian thing 
to speak them, I would seek in these ser- 
mons to direct our thoughts to this matter 
of immediate and vital importance to any 
man of us : How, amid the diversities of 
beliefs and unbeliefs in the world, shall I 
gain a living, personal creed ? how shall I 
form my working-theory of life ? 

There are two classes of people in our 
congregations who may welcome any prac- 
tical suggestions or help in this vital mat- 



6 PERSONAL CREEDS. 

ter. The first are some elderly people. The , 
latter class comprises almost all young peo- 
ple of thoughtfulness or sincerity. There 
are some of the older people in our congre- 
gations, who, years ago, when they were 
in the -formative period of their religious 
life, fell between the different teachings by 
which the churches were then divided. 
Educated in the midst of great doctrinal 
discussions, they came to no definite relig- 
ious confession. They grew up devout at 
heart and conformists to some local church 
in practice, but comparatively creedless. 
"In my early life," so in substance said 
one representative of this class of persons 
to me lately, ''when I was young, each 
church had its complete set of doctrines ; 
and I used to hear them preached, and 
the doctrines of other churches preached 
against. I listened to both sides, and I 
could not see why one might not be as 
true as the othqr. I wanted my children 
to believe something, and was glad when 
they did; but I could not seem to come 
myself to much belief in anj^thing. T sup- 
pose it is the way I was made." Possibly 



MORAL BEGINNINGS. 7 

such was, in a measure, the way that per- 
son was made : for some of us are born 
interrogation-points ; other people are born 
exclamation-points ; and but few have the 
restfulness of a full, finished sentence in 
their natures; but possibly also that was 
the way in which overmuch doctrinal dis- 
cussion has made and left some persons in 
our congregations. At all events, we find 
among us some exemplary people who in 
their old age are still asking that vital 
question, which one must become as a 
little child to answer. How shall I trust ? 

Unlike these persons, both in the condi- 
tions under which their lives are forming 
and in their temper of mind, are the 
younger men and women, who have in 
these seething times to settle for them- 
selves their practical, working-creeds of 
life. In our churches generally there is 
now little or no catechism imposed upon 
the young, and they do not have to listen 
to overmuch doctrinal preaching from our 
pulpits. But the atmosphere which they 
breathe is electrical. New sciences bring 
fresh surprises to their knowledge ; and 



8 PERSONAL CREEDS. 

it seems at times as though the floods had 
broken loose, all ancient things were cast 
adrift, and they themselves afloat without 
anchor or chart. Christian doctrine itself 
appears to some minds to have dissolved 
almost into a state of universal fluidity, 
and many Avould honestly like to know 
what to think and to believe. All this 
is providential, and therefore hopeful; — 
because this is God's world, and not the 
devil's, it is always an interesting and 
hopeful world; — but, these things being 
so, they bring new duties also to the pulpit 
and the church. And this first obligation 
of gaining for one's self a good and suffi- 
cient working-theory of life is one not now 
lightly to be put aside by any man of us. 

Yet as I begin to preach on this subject, 
I am conscious beforehand that what I 
have in mind to say may seem at first 
somewhat disappointing to some of you 
who need most, and who would most wil- 
lingly receive any suggestion of help or 
word of light in this matter. For I shall 
speak of some very simple and elemental 
things. I shall suggest only some famil- 



MOKAL BEGIXXIXGS. 9 

iar duties. I shall ask 5'ou to go back 
and see once more the face of your real 
self m the mirror of some early, clear 
spring of your life. Yet these simple 
things are the vital things ; and if ^Ye do 
not begin with them, all else shall surely 
prove mistaken. Here, for instance, is 
this human body with its complicated tis- 
sues, its system within system of organic 
functions — common matter becoming al- 
most etherealized in the marvellous intri- 
cacies of the brain. Yet the body is built 
up of the simplest vital cells. The micro 
scope can hardly distinguish the particles 
within these transparent circles of elemen= 
tal being. Chemistry stops there, and 
cannot search behind these primal cells 
into the secret of life. When we have to 
do with vital things, we find always the 
simplest things. This is as true in the 
moral order and the spiritual sphere as it 
is in the physical. 

Some verses, for example, in the Gospel 
of John are so simply divine that you can 
only repeat them, and can hardly preach 
from them or teach them, except by hoki- 



16 PERSONAL CREEDS. 

ing them up and looking at them, and let- 
tmg men see what they are. Everywhere 
the truest, divmest things are the simplest, 
— the first and the last, the beginning and 
the end of our knowledge and our faith, — 
as God is the Alpha and the Omega of his 
creation. 

Hence when a man has to form a creed 
for himself, if it is to be a real and vital 
creed, he may be sure that in its begin- 
nings it will be something very simple. 
The initial truths of it will be like the 
vital cells which the biologist finds, of 
which all the tissues are woven. You 
must see, therefore, that the first thing for 
us to do in forming a creed for ourselves 
is to get down to something elemental, to 
begin with something so transparently sim- 
ple, perhaps, that one might think it with- 
out significance. Yet that simple truth, if 
one will trust it, may prove the living ele- 
ment of tlie whole vigorous and healthful 
tissue of a man's faith. 

One comes and asks. How am I to 
believe anything? and emphasizes very 
likely his question by plunging the next 



MORAL BEGINNINGS. 11 

moment into some discussion concerning 
the Bible, its authorship, its discrepancies, 
or its inspiration, about which the last 
magazine article he has glanced through 
may have enabled him to argue a little ; 
his mind tumbles into a heap of confusion 
over some hard doctrine, or his reason 
ventures all liis faith-power, and loses it, 
on the chance of guessing correctly some 
enigma of Providence. Now my point 
right here is that, however reasonable, or 
interesting, many of these questions may 
be in their own place and time, we have 
little to do with them when the first thing 
that we need to be about, if we really 
wish to win a creed for ourselves, is to go 
and hunt through our experience until we 
come to something, however simple, before 
which we must and do say, " I see that to 
be true ; I believe that ; I can trust in 
that." And this, I insist, is the first thing 
for a man in search of a real creed to do : 
to find something, somewhere, which he 
does believe. Not to believe in every- 
thing, but to find something, hoAvever ele- 
mental, which his own life has proved to 



12 PERSONAL CREEDS. 

be true to him. And is it too much to 
say that some such point for faith to be- 
gin at can be found in the experience of 
any ordinary man ? 

In the initial part of the process of gain- 
ing a personal faith, it matters not so 
much what the particular thing is which 
a man may find to believe ; the first, essen- 
tial thing for any man who wishes to live 
a strong life and to do a man's work in the 
world, is to find something somewhere in 
his experience of which he can say with all 
his mind and heart, " That I must believe, 
or deny my own soul ! Whatever else is 
shapeless, this is rock beneath my feet ! 
That is true as life to me ! " For it is of 
vital importance for us to get hold at some 
point of the moral reality of things. A 
young man cannot begin to be a true man 
until at some point his life takes firm root 
in the moral realities. There is no solid 
genuineness in character until one has 
found a point of crystallization for his life 
around something which he believes, and 
which he knows it would be personal dis- 
integration for him to give up. This is 



MOKAL BEGINNINGS. 13 

the last difference between those men who 
are worth somethmg as men in the world, 
and those who are w orthless : the former 
have taken firm root somewhere in the 
moral law, and have held on by that faith ; 
the latter have taken root nowhere, and 
hence have no true life in them. The 
worthless men, the men who count for 
nothing, the mere society men whom Pope 
described as passing from ''•a youth of 
frolics to an old age of cards," are men 
who never have really believed in any- 
thing, who have never fastened their lives 
with a strong grasp upon any moral real- 
ity. Believing in nothing, they are nothing. 
Trusting in no one, they are themselves 
not trustworthy. If a man has no deep 
faith in right or virtue, if he believes in 
no one, not even with a pure love in his 
own mother, he can be himself but the 
creature of circumstance, the slave of 
chance, a prey for all the devils. It can- 
not be put too strongly, this absolute 
necessity for a man's life to take root 
somewhere in the moral order. Without 
this, character becomes a mere leaf in the 



14 PERSONAL CREEDS. 

wind; it is nothing more fixed and firm 
than a piece of seaweed floating with the 
tide. We must as men find something to 
reverence, to trust, and to obey, or we 
shall lose the spirit of a man, and be- 
come ourselves nothing. Hence any habit 
which makes virtue herself a joke on a 
young man's lips, or any course of life 
which turns truth into a lie in an old man's 
heart, is virulent poison that has power to 
kill the soul. A dead branch, fit only for 
the burning, is the plain Biblical symbol — 
and it is true to the life — of the man 
whose hold has been broken on the strong 
moral order of the universe. 

In this it is not yet said at what points, 
or by what faiths, a man may plant him- 
self in moral truth ; my present insistence 
is in general that we must find something, 
however simple or elemental, in which we 
can believe, or our souls will wilt and die. 
The first thing to be done in forming a 
living creed is by some such real faith to 
get into personal contact, if it be only at 
some single sensitive point, with the whole 
realm of moral and spiritual truth. Be- 



MORAL BEGINNINGS. 15 

cause if we do not get some touch with 
reality at the simple beginning of our 
faith, we shall never come to it at the end 
of our creeds* If a man, in other words, 
does not begin somewhere by saying, " That 
is true ; I see that ; I believe that, and 
cannot do otherwise ; it would be mental 
suicide and moral dishonor for me not to 
hold to that," — if a man does not begin in 
this simple and real way with his creed, 
though he may afterwards spin it out into 
a whole series of articles of belief, his 
creed is all the way through empty of 
reality, a deception to himself, and a van- 
ity before the world. 

Now, then, let us seek for some of these 
simple vital things in which a man's creed 
may find its real beginnings. Some of 
these, I say; for the immediate points of 
possible attachment of men's lives to the 
moral reality and whole spiritual order 
of God's universe, are very many, some of 
them near every one of us, if we will put 
forth honest hands and grasp them. 

A passage in the biography of a rarely 
gifted modern believer will furnish a help- 



16 PERSONAL CREEDS. 

ful example of the way a true man's creed 
must first fasten upon some elemental, 
moral reality, and then how it ma}^ grow 
from that, and blossom, and bear at length 
whole clusters of the fruits of the Spirit. 
"It must be right to do right" ; so Frederick 
W. Robertson, at one time in his religious 
history, got down to that simple beginning 
of faith. He had inherited a creed, — the 
whole articulated creed which he found in 
the pulpit of the Church of England. I 
will not pause to quote the words by which, 
in an address to workingmen, he has de- 
scribed that "awful moment when the soul 
begins to find that the props on which it 
has blindly rested so long are, many of 
them, rotten, and begins to suspect them 
all ; when it begins to feel the nothingness 
of many of the traditionary opinions which 
have been received with implicit confi- 
dence, and in that horrible insecurity be- 
gins also to doubt whether there be any 
thing to believe at all." Rather let me 
quote these words in which that soul, cast 
adrift in the darkness, found the point 
where it could touch reality, and in touch- 



MORAL BEGINNINGS. 17 

ing firm moral truth became sound and 
strong again. ''In the darkest hour," so 
he wrote, tearhig the leaf from the expe- 
rience of his own heart, ''in the darkest 
hour through which a human soul can 
pass, whatever else is doubtful, this at 
least is certain. If there be no God and 
no future state, yet even then, it is better 
to be generous than selfish, better to be 
chaste than licentious, better to be true 
than false, better to be brave than to be a 
coward. . . . Thrice blessed is he who, — 
when all is drear and cheerless within and 
without, when his teachers terrify him, 
and his friends shrink from him, — has ob- 
stinately clung to moral good. Thrice 
blessed, because Ids night shall pass into 
clear, bright day." 

Reflect a moment on the logic of the 
Spirit in that passage of a human life. I 
admit that it may not have followed any 
formal logic of the understanding. I ad- 
mit that between this proposition, " It is 
better to be generous than selfish, better to 
be chaste than licentious, better to be true 
than false, better to be brave than a cow- 



18 PERSONAL CEEEDS. 

arcl,'' — and this other proposition, There 
is a God and a future life, — there are 
several intervening steps for reason care- 
fully to take, or. boldly to jump. But 
whatever may be our formal arguments or 
painstaking logic in the effort of the un- 
derstanding to reach belief in the existence 
of God and in the future life, there is no 
doubt what was the actual, vital growth 
upwards of that man's faith from that 
deep moral root. Once firmly planted in 
this moral reality which underlies all true 
life, Robertson's belief soon grew by its 
own vitality into religious fruitfulness. 
The logic of the Spirit in the inward but 
most real processes of his life carried the 
man from faith in doing right to trust in 
the God of righteousness. The man in 
the darkness who had grasped the sure 
faith that it is better to be braA^e than a 
coward, was already far on the way 
towards an ennobling and illuminating 
faith in his God, who is light, and in 
whom there is no darkness at all. Here, 
then, is a firm place for any man to begin 
to build his personal creed. Let but this 



MORAL BEGINNINGS. 19 

conviction become his formative principle 
of life, which it Avoukl be personal dis- 
honor for him to doubt, that it is better to 
be generous than selfish, better to be chaste 
than licentious, better to be brave than a 
coward. Let a man once get real and firm 
hold of only so much moral truth as this ; 
let him believe that if in the presence of 
danger he should flinch from duty, his soul 
would become afterward its own flaming 
hell to him; that if at the word of com- 
mand to leap forward, though death blazed 
from a whole battery before him to be 
taken, he could hesitate and fail, his 
memory of cowardice would become an 
everlasting torment to him ; that if a chiv- 
alrous w^ord ought to be spoken and 
his lips should remain closed, if a Avrong 
should appeal to him to be made right, 
and his arm hang limp by his side, if ever 
the thought of money, reputation, posi- 
tion, influence, or reward should bribe his 
tongue to silence, or tempt him to hide his 
soul in prudence when it ought to stand 
forth simply brave, then the recollection of 
such base denial Avould make him ashamed 



20 perso:n'al creeds. 

of himself forever, unless indeed he could 
expiate his cowardice in some trial of fire 
and come forth a brave soul again ; — let a 
man, I say, thus grasp with all his heart 
and his whole strength this single sure 
truth that it is better to be generous than 
to be selfish, better to be brave than to be 
a coward, and then see how this truth, to 
which the man has given himself up 
wholly, will become as a chariot to his 
soul, — a chariot of fire, and horses of fire, 
like the chariot in which Elijah went up 
as by a whirlwind into heaven. So that 
moral faith bore Robertson's spirit up into 
the heavenly places. So an entire com- 
mittal of a soul even to a single moral 
truth will in the processes of the Spirit 
lift it up, and it will carry it sometimes 
almost as with a whirlwind into the high- 
est realms of spiritual reality and light. 

Robertson's truth, from which his life 
revived, and his creed grew again, — his 
own and not another's, — represents only 
one of the many possible points of contact 
which men may find between themselves 
and the moral law and spiritual verities. 



MORAL BEGIXXIXGS. 21 

I am not saying that always men will 
grow, or advance at once from such begin- 
nings of real faith into a full, rich creed, 
or into clear Christian assurance. But 
my insistence is, that always we must 
begin with some simple thing, some near, 
present truth, if it be only a belief in 
right, or as a man's trust in his mother. 
We must always begin with something 
which we can and do believe with all our 
minds and hearts, or we never shall come 
to any high and large faith worthy a 
man's confessing ; and further, when thus 
in solemn sincerity we have begun with 
something real to form our personal creed, 
experience shows that in all probability 
we shall be led on and on, and other, 
farther, diviner truths will erelong be- 
come ours. Let a man knock resolutely 
at any door of moral truth until it be 
opened to him, and he will pass into a 
whole realm of truths. Through what- 
ever particular gateway or Avindow, or 
over whatever wall of difficulty a man 
once gets fairly into the moral world, all 
things in the moral universe become his. 



22 PEKSONAL CREEDS. 

There is no truth, however lowly, which, 
if a man obeys it, does not have further 
revelations in it, and that may not lead 
him from grace to grace and from strength 
to strength. 

In the old Biblical story, if Abraham 
had not run from Ms tent-door to meet 
the three men who stood in some mystery 
of their coming before him, and if he had 
not exercised towards them a simple and 
sincere hospitality, he never w^ould have 
received the further revelation from the 
Lord, with which, as his angels, they had 
been sent. And there is truth for us, if 
we will take it, in this Biblical story of 
the ^asit of the angel of the Lord to the 
patriarch. If we wall w^elcome the truth 
which seems to stand over against us at 
the door, if we will treat it as it becomes 
us, children b}^ nature of some divine 
promise, to treat any truths that may ap- 
pear before us, it will surely have some 
further word of the Lord for us ; and 
we shall receive more than we may have 
thought W'hen w^e did the simple duty 
of the moment, or were ready to own 



MORAL BEGINNINGS. 23 

and welcome the first appearances of truth 
to us. 

In fact, it is astonishing, and greatly 
encouraging, to observe how near in the 
experiences of men the divinest truths 
come to the humblest duties ; how often, 
when a man does some single true thing, 
it will seem to throw open a window^ for 
him out into the whole light of life. The 
distance is not so great as it sometimes 
seems between things human and divine. 
It is not so far along the way of the Spirit 
between faith in goodness and trust in 
God. There lies no astronomic space 
between conscience in man and God in 
heaven. A right deed lays hand of trust 
directly on the Eternal Righteousness. 
The understanding may falter, logic may 
travel after in its slow way ; but a gener- 
ous spirit leaps to the thought of love's 
endless, deathless life ; a brave soul lives 
in the courage of its immortality ; the 
highest is closest to the lowest ; God ex- 
ists always just beyond duty ; immortality 
is pledged in true life and love. 

I shall have to speak further and more 



24 PERSONAL CREEDS. 

explicitly of these ultimate points of human 
history and divine revelation — these pri- 
mal facts of our lives, unresolvable into 
anything simpler — these first and final and 
permanent truths of being and of revela- 
tion, which men may seize and hold with a 
living faith ; and I shall need also to indi- 
cate how, in touch and contact with these, 
we may expand, enrich, and fructify our 
personal creed until it shall yield us truth 
enough to live by and to die by. 

What I have been thus far saying may 
possibly seem to some of you not to con- 
tain much belief, or to go very far; but 
who of us does not need every now and 
then to begin again at the beginning ? And 
these words point, at least, towards the 
moral springs of any Christian faith which 
shall have in it power to keep itself pure, 
and to freshen life for others. I think in 
going back and up to these primal moral 
sources and first human springs of faith, 
we are doing that which Jesus must often 
have been thinking of when he put the 
beginning of his whole Gospel into these 
general and exceedingly simple words, 



MORAL BEGIKNINGS. 25 

"repent and believe." These are moral 
verbs, signifying certain initial energies 
and actions of men's lives. And the first 
of these verbs was left both by John the 
Baptist and by Jesus without any specific 
object, for each and every man to make 
specific in the particulars of his own sins. 
To repent with a real and particular repent- 
ance, to repent of anything false, unworthy, 
impure, cowardly, is to go back, and at 
that particular point of repentance to get 
into direct soul-touch with all God's moral 
being. A man repents of some selfish 
thing; by that act he again comes into 
contact with the eternal truth of love. A 
man repents of a false, mean word; at that 
point of his repentance he touches ever- 
lasting truth. A man repents of any lust ; 
by that way he goes straight out towards 
all the moral sovereignty and holiness that 
there is in the universe. And naturally, 
as day follows night, the word believe fol- 
lows the word repent, A man is left be- 
lieving in something true, good, beneficent, 
whenever he repents of anything evil, false, 
unloving. So these two words which were 



26 PERSONAL CREEDS. 

first in Jesus' preacliing of liis Gospel, must 
. still be first in our work of laying the foun- 
dations of a creed for life. And it were 
better to lay now'^these foundations, though 
the workman fail before he dies to build 
the whole Christian house of faith upon 
them; it were better to build upon this 
rock of moral truth, repenting until one 
gets down to it, and believing as far as 
one can build upon it, than to put together 
a whole Christian confession, spacious and 
pretentious, with nothing but the sands at 
the foundation of it. 



n. 

IN PERSONAL TOUCH WITH 
CHRIST. 



He saitli unto them^ But who say ye that I am? 
And Simon Peter answered and said, l^hou art the 
Christy the Son of the living God. — Matt. xvi. is, 16. 



II. 



IN PERSOKAL TOUCH WITH 
CHEIST. 

IT was urged in the preceding sermon 
that a man must himself first take 
root somewhere in moral reality, if he is 
to grow into a fruitful faith. I wish to 
follow further the same method of form- 
ing a personal creed, as I shall seek for 
some points of personal contact with the 
Christian doctrines. 

In" our effort to gain a Christian creed 
for life we read the Bible, go to church, 
are taught the doctrines, and then very 
likely fall erelong into perplexity. There 
are many religious doctrines, and they 
extend over wide ranges of possible truth. 
The churches are not altogether agreed 
concerning the doctrines of Christianity, 
and the Bible itself leaves unanswered 
many questions which it raises. It might 

29 



30 PERSONAL CREEDS. 

even be said that it raises more questions 
than it answers. Christianity is the great 
interrogation of history ; — Who do men 
say that I, the Son of man, am ? Who do 
ye say that I am ? 

We need first of all to gain some real 
contact with the life of Christ, to come 
into some personal touch with the Son of 
man, or all his teachings will be but as 
words in the air to us. And if we would 
bring to the faith any man who has no 
settled Christian belief, unless we can suc- 
ceed in leading him to a Christian creed 
in this living way, we shall only make 
another scribe or Pharisee of him ; and 
the world has already enough of such, and 
no use for more of them. 

I have taken a text from a passage of 
Scripture Avhich shows how the multitude 
thought and talked about Christ, and also 
the way in which the disciples had come 
to know him. This difference between 
the people's way of apprehending Christ 
and the disciples' way, may help u.s in our 
present desire to find the right method foi 
gaining a personal Christian creed. The 



PERSONAL TOUCH WITH CHRIST. 31 

text contains the first distinctively Chris- 
tian confession ever made by a disciple. 
And you notice how short it was, "And 
Simon Peter answered and said, Thou art 
the Christ, the Son of the living God." 
Ah, Peter, you couldn't come to the com- 
munion-table of some of our churches with 
only that creed. Unless you added some 
further " memorandum " of belief, you 
would not do for a missionary to the hea- 
then with a confession so immature as that. 
'^ Blessed art thou, Simon Bar-Jonah"; — 
who was it that said this of Peter and his 
short Christian creed ? The Lord was ready 
instantly to found his Church, as upon a 
rock, on the man who had made that first 
simple confession, " Thou art the Christ, 
the Son of the living God." To the man 
of this simple creed the Lord gave the 
power of the keys in his Church. And 
possibly the time is near Avhen we shall 
take off all other complicated locks of our 
modern invention, and leave only that 
simple latch of Peter's on the door of the 
Lord's house. 

The interesting thing in this Scripture, 



82 PERSONAL CREEDS. 

and the instructive inquiry for our present 
purpose, lies in this : how had Peter ever 
found for himself the way up to that simple 
yet grand confession of the Christ ? You 
notice that Jesus brought out by his two 
questions the difference between the belief 
of the multitudes concerning him, and the 
faith of the disciples in him. That con- 
trast in their apprehension of Christ corre- 
sponded to some difference in the manner 
of their approach towards him, or their 
endeavor to know him. We need not look 
far to discover what these divergent ways 
were. The multitude had been content to 
look occasionally at Jesus as he passed by, 
and to tell one another what was said of 
his mighty works. The disciples had lived 
with him. The people had discussed his 
miracles ; some did not believe, and many 
others were willing to say. He must be a 
prophet, another Elijah, or a John the 
Baptist. The creed of the multitude did 
not go any farther or deeper than their 
experience of Christ. Not having been 
touched or changed in their lives by his 
Spirit, they could confess at best only that 



PERSONAL TOUCH WITH CHRIST. 33 

he was a worker of miracles, perhaps a 
mighty prophet. But the disciples had 
learned Christ in p^ very different way. 
They had not looked up and watched him 
awhile as he went through the streets of 
Capernaum, and then hurried back to their 
business, buying and selling, and jewing 
one another. They had gone and lived 
with the Nazarene day in and day out. 
They found Jesus out in his every-day life. 
And so living with him, they could not 
think of him merely as an Elijah, or a John 
the Baptist. Living with him, and trying 
to bring their lives up to the level of his 
life, they had learned that the Son of man 
was not like any other Hebrew man. And 
when one day the Master turned, and 
asked, ''Who say ye that I am?" Peter 
spoke up out of his personal knowledge of 
the Lord, and said, like an honest man, the 
one thing he could say, " Thou art the 
Christ, the Son of the living God." That 
was the way in which the first, simplest 
Christian creed was formed. It grew out 
of life with Jesus. And that vital, per- 
sonal creed lies at the foundation of the 



34 PERSONAL CEEEDS. 

Church. Peter had lived with the Christ 
into his confession of liim. Sometliing 
real and fresh from God had come to him 
through the life of the Son of man. And 
he owned it. 

Are we now to do a similar thing ? Can 
we get a Christian creed, however simple, 
in the same way? Can w^e lay hold of 
Christianity, as of old Peter discovered for 
himself the Christ ? 

Some of us may say, We cannot do that. 
For the Lord does not go a,bout among 
men now. We cannot study him at first 
sight in every-day life as Peter did. We 
have his gospels to read, not the Lord 
himself to see. And it is true we are in 
this respect at a disadvantage. We must 
go to the Book, while the first disciples 
could go with their questions to the Mas- 
ter himself. But there is a greater advan- 
tage on our side. Jesus' life was something 
entirely new, and at that time unrelated 
to man's whole life. Its fruits were largely 
in the future, when the first disciples knew 
him, and had to make up their minds who 
the Son of man was. It is now the old. 



PERSONAL TOUCH WITH CHEIST. 35 

old story of the Gospel. And we have 
seen Jesus' life entering into the life of 
the world, forming history, and inspiring 
humanity with its Spirit. But with this 
living Spirit of the Christ, already become 
historic, and now working in humanity, 
we have to do as directly and immediately 
as ever the disciples had to do with Jesus 
himself. And we can go and live Avith 
that Spirit, and in it, if we will, as truly 
as ever Peter lived in Galilee with Jesus. 
This, then, is our present open way of 
coming to a Christian creed, of getting 
into some real touch with the Christianity 
of Christ, if we wish to do it. We can 
study the Christ by his Spirit in every- 
day life, as Peter watched him day in 
and day out while he was on earth. This 
is a perfectly feasible thing for any man 
who really wants to do it. He can try to 
live with the Spirit of Christ through a 
single day's business. We can make the 
effort to live according to the Spirit of 
Christ for one whole week, and learn then 
to what thoughts, conclusions, and desires 
a week's life, as near as we can approach 



36 PERSONAL CREEDS. 

to the level of Christ's life, mav have 
brought us. On the other hand, we might 
spend the week, like many of the people 
who first heard of him, discussing the 
strange doctrines, and Avondering at the 
miracles ; and in that way our creed at 
best would make Christ only as another 
Elijah to us, — some mighty prophet, of 
whom at heart we may be afraid. 

The first real thing, I am saying, for 
us to do, if we would gain a personal 
Christian creed, is to do what Peter and 
the other disciples did, — go and live 
awhile with Jesus Christ. 

Let us see if we cannot make this stand 
out more clearly by considering the matter 
in some particulars of it. For this purpose 
let us open the gospels, and find two or 
three points by which it may be possible 
for any of us to lay hold of the Christian 
doctrines by the near ends of them, to 
grasp for ourselves with some moral vigor 
the truth of Christ's life. 

With this object in mind, we read the 
gospels, and find the following as one pos- 



PERSONAL TOUCH WITH CHRIST. 37 

sible point of attachment of our life to the 
life of Christ. 

John describes Jesus as full of truth. 
Spotless truthfulness was the daily glory 
of this Man from God. Truth seemed 
absolutely to dwell in him. Jesus de- 
scribes himself as one who told the truth. 
'' Every one that is of the truth," he said 
to Pilate, "heareth my voice." Then let 
us begin at this virtue of truthfulness to 
be followers of Christ, seeking to live with 
him in his truthfulness. Let a man deter- 
mine to get some real grasp of Christian- 
ity at this positive point of truthfulness. 
Suppose one tries to live one day, one 
whole week, with absolute sincerity ; to 
live like Christ, as a man whose whole 
being and conversation is of the truth. 
What a new beginning of a Christian 
creed for life that might be even to some 
of us church-members and ministers ! To 
rid one's life of all make-believe ; to see 
facts in their straight lines, and to speak 
squarely what one sees to be true ; to be 
truthful in one's secret thought, not cod- 
dling one's own soul ; to be full of truth 



38 PERSONAL CREEDS. 

in all one's relations with people and in 
business, — that would be a very plain 
way, and a near, possible way also, for one 
to begin to follow Christ ; that is, to begin 
to be a Christian man, with a real Chris- 
tian creed of life. 

This may seem too simple a way of be- 
ginning to form a Christian creed. But 
try it ! Try it for a week or a month, and 
see what may come of it. Seek to give 
up with a ruthless determination all make- 
believe, and to live with Christ in absolute 
genuineness of character, and learn what 
the divine reward of such manner of life 
may be. For in proportion as any of us 
succeed in living thus with the Christ 
in perfect sinceritj^ of being, it is true we 
may find some crosses to bear, and make 
enemies, as the Lord did; but we shall 
also find life growing fuller and richer 
with a divine presence and an immortal 
hope ; and to the true man, truths of God 
will come with noble greetings from all 
the ways of God's creation before him. 
True-hearted men, men themselves genu- 
ine as their Lord, do not, as a rule, find 



PERSONAL TOUCH WITH CHRIST. 39 

the universe to be hollow-hearted ; but at 
the focus and centre of all moral reality 
they know the living God. 

I pass to another point of entrance for 
us into life mth Christ, and consequently 
also into the disciple's knowledge in such 
life. This time let one of the beatitudes 
attract us. It opens before us a most 
excellent way into a Christian faith: 
" Blessed are the poor in spirit." Only let 
us not fail to take the first necessary steps 
up through this beatitude into the king- 
dom. It is not, Blessed are they Avho say 
Lord, Lord ! There is nothing in all ethi- 
cal teaching more radical than this same 
sweet beatitude. It requires thorough 
work of any man who would receive it. 
Suppose we try for a day or week to form 
a creed of Christian life for ourselves in 
the manner marked by this blessing. One 
of the first things we shall have to do will 
be to heap up all our pride and pretence, 
and then to kindle in our souls a hot fire 
of wrath, and to burn up those shams 
and delusions which we love. Throw it 
all in — our pride of ancestry, of position. 



40 PERSONAL CREEDS. 

of attainment, of money, of talent, of so- 
cial position — every branch and fruit of 
our pretence ; burn it all up : and then 
over the ashes of our pride we must pray 
for a new heart simple enough, and sincere 
like Christ's, to own a brother in the hum- 
blest man we meet, and to receive a word 
of the Lord in the least duty which any 
moment may bring to us from the will of 
the Father. Become poor in spirit — my 
soul but another human emptiness to be 
filled, may be, from some divine fulness ! 
My life but as the lowly banks through 
which some renewing grace may flow like 
a stream ! 

" Blessed are the poor in spirit " ; so the 
Master says : yes. Lord, but we have books, 
and knowledge, and power ; and we love 
to be greeted in the market-places ; and 
our synagogue is ancient ; and our fathers 
sat in the uppermost seats. But if any 
man of us wants to be a Christian man, 
and to win for himself a real Christian 
creed, he can do no better than by taking 
this single beatitude and letting it for a 
week to come, from one Sabbath-day to the 



PERSONAL TOUCH WITH CHRIST. 41 

next, be the whole Bible for him, be all 
the Christian doctrine for his lesson — 
simply this one thing and nothing more ; 
and then, if he will thoroughly learn this 
truth, if this much has entered as a living 
word of the Lord into his soul, he may be 
prepared for some higher lesson of Chris- 
tian doctrine ; he may be ready to go 
farther into the heart of Christianity. 
Through the difficult gate of this high 
beatitude he may discover that he has 
entered into a broader, sunnier kingdom, 
having more of heaven in it than he had 
dreamed of before. 

The Christianity of Christ presents it- 
self to us men at a great many points by 
means of which we may gain some personal 
access to it, if we wish to do so ; and differ- 
ent men may apprehend the truth as it is 
in Jesus by different contacts of their 
lives with it ; but we all need to find en- 
trance into the doctrines of Christ in some 
such living way, if our confession of them 
shall not prove a condemnation rather than 
our salvation. For the men who will have 
the scantiest chance for justitication at the 



42 PEESOKAL CREEDS. 

Lord Clirist's bar after death, — shall they 
not be those of us who have the longest 
creeds and the shortest practice ? 

Let me speak now of but one more of 
these real ends of Christian doctrine which 
are well within our reach. In the same 
Sermon on the Mount are these words of 
Christ : '' Give to him that asketh thee, and 
from him that would borrow of thee turn 
not thou away." Ah I but that won't do ! 
That is too much ; that is not scientific 
ethics. I am not to give to every beggar ; 
and lending without good security were 
folly. Very well ; I do not think the Mas- 
ter would care to dispute any of these 
common propositions of prudence with us ; 
the Gospel is not a professor's lecture : but 
I hear Jesus repeating his word, '-' Give, and 
turn not away " ; and I see him looking 
straight in the face of any man of us, 
richer or poorer, scientific or unlearned, 
and saying, ''Take that as you know I 
mean it ; no subterfuges, no evasions ; no 
excuses with which you only half deceive 
yourselves and do not blind me, — I, the 
Son of man, who knows what is in man." 



pehsonal touch with christ. 43 

We may see the Master, if we want to see 
him, marking for us right here one plain 
place where we may enter into his life, and 
begin to have a real Christian creed. And 
yet how we love to pass by on the other 
side of this particular open way into the 
Christian faith. We go by this gate, say- 
ing, '^ I find great difficulty with some of 
the doctrines, such as the Trinity, atone- 
ment, and future punishment ; I don't 
know about these." Very well ; just now, 
in this present earthly stage of our educa- 
tion for eternal life, it is much more impor- 
tant that we should understand Christ at 
the moral beginnings of the Gospel of his 
Spirit ; and here is one of those begin- 
nings. 

A commandment is put before us clearly 
and severely as a piece of sharp steel, the 
point of it not to be evaded, in this single 
glealuing verse of Jesus' sermon. The Lord 
did not care to stop to add the qualifica- 
tions, or to explain the conditions under 
which that precept is to be practised. 
Probably the Lord knew us men well 
enough to leave us to add the qualifica- 



44 PEKSOXAL CREEDS. 

tions, or to make any necessary rebates on 
his commandments. He was intent on put- 
ting his truth so that we men may have no 
excuse for not seeing it and doing it. 

In tliis verse, then, as any one may see, 
the Lord lifts up absolute generosity of soul 
at one gateway into his kingdom. This is 
one living way of entrance into a Christian 
creed, and few there be who go in thereat. 
Though we may long have professed his 
name, though we may have come at some 
other places in our experience of life into 
sympathy with the Master, it would be 
profitable for any of us to go back, to 
begin over again, and to try this way of 
knowing Christ Jesus, — '' Give to him that 
asketh, . . . turn not away." Suppose we 
seek to gain a real Christian creed in that 
manner for a week of honest disciplesliip. 
Suppose that from this Sunday to next 
Sunday we try to live in the spirit of that 
word which Christ himself followed when 
he lived among men ; suppose that a man 
resolves. However busy I may be, however 
bothered with many calls upon me, I will 
endeavor to be a Christian man in this one 



PBRSOKAL TOUCH WITH CHRIST. 45 

particular ; I will try this Christian experi- 
ment for one week ; I will turn no one 
away for whom I have power to do any- 
thing ; at least, if I cannot give him what 
he asks, I will not let him go without feel- 
ing that I have done what I could for him ; 
I will be a Christian man in this one prac- 
tical point of human sympathy with the 
Master's life ! What would follow, if any 
number of us should make this single Scrip- 
ture our whole Bible for a season, though 
we should lay for awhile all the other doc- 
trines on the shelf? One thing surely 
would happen : we should see on Sunday 
in our churches some men who may not 
have gone to church for years, some who 
might come wondering what new thing 
had been brought to pass in the religious 
world. And another and very happy thing 
might happen to any of us who should once 
succeed in getting at this point this real 
hold of Christianity, — we should go to 
church, and whatever the sermon, or who- 
ever the preacher, we should find more 
divine truth coming home to us, and re- 
maining in our thoughts to light up our 



46 PERSONAL CKEEDS. 

lives for us, than we had often seen before. 
Get close to any word of Christ, and you 
will see a great light ! Stand off, and no 
wonder the light grows dim in the fogs. 

And, my friends, whatever we may 
preach, or say we believe, we do not un- 
derstand the first principles of the divine 
atonement, we do not come within astro- 
nomic distance of the kingdom of heaven, 
until through some such human sympathy, 
or deed of truth, we let ourselves into the 
life of Christ. And all our religious pulse- 
feelings, and careful account of our va- 
rious religious symptoms, and comfortable 
nursing of our religious notions, and occa- 
sional hot-water bags for warming the old 
religious numbness, and pampering our 
religious appetite on the latest theological 
luxuries, and careful dressing up of our 
souls for religious consolations, — all these 
are but signs of a sick man's weakness, 
and do not witness to the living Master's 
creed. God be praised, the Church of 
Christ is to abandon with a mighty repent- 
ance this whole sickliness of its confession, 
and it is beginning to show to the people 



PERSO^'AL TOUCH WITH CHRIST. 47 

a creed truer to the divine life of the Lord 
among men. Some of us have had visions 
and dreams of our church entering through 
this great door and effectual into the new 
apostolic confession which some day the 
whole Church is to make of the Son of 
man who is the Son of the living God. I 
read an article of that simple, vital creed 
from the book of life only the other day ; 
I wrong no privacy by nameless mention 
of it. This was the Christian truth I read 
afresh from life : I had been sent for to 
give Christian burial to a woman whose 
relatives had been unknown, — a forlorn, 
friendless soul. Those living near by had 
thought her peculiar, not knowing what 
wrong, suffered years before, had warped 
her being ; and that woman this church, 
by some of its members, privately and 
quietly had taken to one of its homes that 
she might find a Christian place in which 
to lie down and die. It Avas a simple 
Christian thing to do ; yet I who, not 
knowing the circumstances, had been dis- 
turbed by a call of pastoral duty towards 
a stranger which interrupted this sermon- 



48 PERSONAL CREEDS. 

writing, came back with that Christian 
thing which some one had done, weaving 
itself into my thought of the Christian 
creed ; and I found it easier to look with 
a believer's eye at the sciences which were 
assembled in my bookshelves, and to say 
in my heart, '^ Thou art the Christ, the 
Son of the living God," — because I had 
come from a human home where a word of 
the Master had been done to one of the 
least in his name : " I was sick, and ye 
visited me ; I was a stranger, and ye took 
me in." And that one Christian thing 
which had been done, brought to me again 
and more distinctly the vision and the 
dream which many now are seeing of the 
church of the future. The days, I thought, 
are at hand, perhaps nearer than we think, 
when we shall find Christ's doctrine every- 
where as the bread and the wine of the 
life of the people. Such works of faith 
shall not be left here and there to be 
Ivrought by private hands of charity, but 
the church will give in every way the 
Lord's life to the people. And at the 
heart ol all great communities, at every 



PERSONAL TOUCH WITH CHKIST. 49 

centre of our crowding, anxious life, some 
church will stand, not to preach the 
Lord's truth only, or to call men to 
prayer; but it shall stand, in the name 
of the Son of man, fully organized and 
equipped, and ready to do any service that 
men may give to men who need. 

The ministering church will have on its 
staff not the preacher only, or the relig- 
ious teacher, but others who may have 
been called and chosen to the works of the 
Christ for the people. Among the poor 
and the sick, the clergyman of the church 
will not be called to pray where the trained 
nurse of the church is not also sent to min- 
ister. The church will represent its Mas- 
ter and Lord by a whole choice apostolate 
of helpers among the people. And in such 
full and complete ministry the bequests of 
the dead will work with the services of the 
living for the witness to the real Christian 
creed, until the Lord shall come. 

If we begin thus our Christian creeds, 
in such real manner as I have had in mind, 
at almost any point where we maj^ find the 
truths of Christ to be done by us, they can 



50 PERSONAL CREEDS. 

be trusted to bring in time their own evi- 
dences to us, and they will yield light also 
for the reason's use and guidance in the 
study of the doctrines. Peter living with 
Christ finds the Messiah. The disciples 
walking with Jesus become the Christian 
apostles. 

But without going further now, this 
sermon sums itself up in these two points, 
and with this outlook from them. You 
may never gain any true understanding of 
the Son of man, whatever you may think 
about the Christ, if you are content to 
seek him as those scribes did who stood 
around in Jerusalem discussing his mira- 
cles, or those people who ran after him 
from Capernaum to get some loaf or fish 
from his gift. For the man who takes up 
the Bible for the sake of discussion will 
find a stone ; and the other man who goes 
to church to get a piece of the social loaf 
from it, usually finds the bread which he 
seizes, turning sour in his mouth. There 
are ways in which we surely cannot learn 
who the Son of man is. But any one of us 
may know the Christ, even as Peter came 



PERSONAL TOUCH WITH CHRIST. 51 

to his confession of him, if we will seek, 
in some real particulars, at least, to live 
with Christ in his Spirit, day in and day 
out. And this is the outlook for him who 
willeth to do the will of God ; he shall 
know of the doctrine. Following where 
the Spirit of Christ leads, his life, too, shall 
come sooner or later to its Csesarea Phil- 
ippi, and one whom he has learned to 
know in the Divine Spirit of His life will 
stand radiant before his soul, and say, 
" Blessed art thou : for flesh and blood 
hath not revealed it unto thee, but my 
Father which is in heaven." 



III. 

NEARER ENDS OF HEAVENLY 
TRUTHS. 



If I told you earthly things, and ye believe not, 
how shall ye believe, if I tell you heavenly things f — 
John iii. 12. 



III. 

NEARER ENDS OF HEAVENLY 
TRUTHS. 

I HAVE taken this text because it 
shows further Jesus' method of teach- 
ing intelligent men. The text contains a 
principle of faith for use in our effort to 
enlarge and expand our personal creeds. 
According to this word of Jesus if a man 
has faith in those parts of his teaching 
which come within the range of our 
earthly experience, he may then be pre- 
pared to believe in those portions of 
Jesus' doctrine which he taught from his 
higher, heavenly experience. We are to 
lay hold of divine truth by those near 
ends of the doctrine which are let down 
into our earthly life, and then we may 
hope to gain faith in the more heavenly 
truths. 

The text indicates plainly this principle 



56 PERSONAL CREEDS. 

of progress in a man's possible faith in 
the Christian doctrines. Jesus, you re- 
member, was talking with a master in 
Israel who had already learned, or might 
be presumed to know, certain religious 
truths from his education and experience 
as a Hebrew man. Jesus began his con- 
versation by referring to those first prin- 
ciples of spiritual life and knowledge with 
which Nicodemus might already have been 
somewhat familiar. Jesus impressed upon 
Nicodemus the truth that spiritual vision 
belongs only to the spiritual man. 

" Except a man be born anew, he can- 
not see the kingdom of God." Unless a 
man is born not of flesh and blood merely, 
but born of the Spirit, he can expect to 
have no sense or vision of the kingdom 
of God. To see spiritual things, one must 
first have a spiritual eye. To know the 
heavenly things, one must gain some heart 
for heaven. Seeing the kingdom depends 
upon some inward power to see what is 
lying without and above us, and is to be 
seen of God's kingdom. This truth is a 
near end of the Master's teaching which 



HEAVEXLY TRUTHS. 57 

a sincere Israelite should have been quick 
to apprehend. That law of vision of the 
kingdom had been a principle of all pro- 
phetic experience in Israel. Of course it 
was easy for a doctor of Jewish divinity 
to whip his mind into a foam and con- 
fusion over that truth of the kingdom, if 
he was not ready to receive it simply and 
with deep, quiet trustfulness. Jesus had 
assumed this law of the dependence of 
spiritual vision upon spiritual birth as an 
evident truth, which a Master of the 
Hebrew law and prophets ought to accept 
at once on so clear a statement of it as he 
had just made. A man cannot see the 
kingdom of God unless he has been born 
anew, born of the Spirit of it. But Nico- 
demus, led perhaps through some Rabbini- 
cal habit of mind to reason subtly where 
he might have simply trusted and assented, 
met this truth of religious experience by 
raising that old question which the finite 
mind can ask of any fact of life. How? 
''How can a man be born when he is old? " 
Jesus replied by stating the same elemen- 
tary truth of spiritual life and knowledge 



58 PERSONAL CREEDS. 

still more explicitly, and then by a simple 
analogy indicating that men are not able 
to answer that question, How can it be ? 
even in regard to familiar phenomena of 
nature. But facts are facts, whatever mav 
be the final explanation of them; so this 
truth that spiritual vision accompanies 
spiritual manhood and depends upon it, 
is a fact of our present or earthly expe- 
rience. '' So is every one that is born of 
the Spirit." Nicodemus repeated his ques- 
tion, though less confidently and more 
reverently, the second time. Jesus appeals 
again to Nicodemus's presumed experi- 
ence as a master in Israel, and asserts in 
the next verse his own higher knowledge. 
Then the Lord declares this law of faith 
which is contained in our text : if one will 
not believe when he may lay hold of the 
near, earthly ends of religious doctrine, 
how can he expect to advance to faith in 
the higher, heavenly truths of the divine 
teaching? If Nicodemus fails to grasp 
that truth of the spiritual birth which is 
a first fact of all quickened religious life, 
how can he understand Jesus when he 



HEAVENLY TRUTHS. 59 

proceeds in the closing part of his con- 
versation to speak of those heavenly things 
of God's love and his atonement ? If anj^ 
man of us will not seize the Christian doc- 
trine by some portion of it, which lies 
within our possible earthly experience, 
how can he expect to rise to the appre- 
hension of the heavenly parts of the 
teachings of the Christ? 

Or, to take the law of the progressive 
formation of a Christian creed out of the 
negative form in which it lies before us in 
our text, and to put it in its positive prin- 
ciple, it runs as follows : from faith in the 
more earthly portions of the Christian doc- 
trines one may expect to gain further 
beliefs in the more heavenly truths of rev- 
elation. Grasp with a firm faith those 
religious truths which are let down within 
your reach, and let them swing you up to 
higher knowledge. But do not let us pre- 
tend to have been wafted up into the top 
boughs of the tree of Christian knowledge, if 
we have not cared to lay hold of the branches 
within our reach close to the ground, and 
to climb up by them. We may read our 



60 PERSONAL CREEDS. 

Lord's text both ways: if you will not 
lay hold of the earthly parts of my doctrine, 
the heavenly things of it are not for your 
eyes; and, conversely, you do not really 
see the heavenly things, if you have not 
moral eyes for the practice of the earthly 
things. 

The man, for instance, who is so morally 
near-sighted that he does not perceive that 
it is better to be brave than a coward, bet- 
ter to be generous than selfish — what is 
his religious eyesight worth when he pre- 
tends to see the far, high, heavenly truths ? 
These two parts of the Lord Christ's doc- 
trine go together, the earthly and the 
heavenly. It is true, a man may have 
some real perception of the lower part of 
the doctrine, or of those religious truths 
which enter directly into his present ex- 
perience, and still liis eyes may be holden 
waiting the higher revelations ; but cer- 
tainly if a man disregards the earthly side 
of divine truth which he should know, al- 
though he would have us subscribe to some 
theological map of the heavens, of which 
he may have taken the agency in the 



HEAVEXLY TRUTHS. 61 

churches, he but deceives himself, and the 
truth is not in him. 

To all of us who are willing to receive 
this law of advance in the Christian beliefs, 
as Jesus wished Nicodemus to take it, it 
will prove a very helpful principle of prog- 
ress in the upbuilding and enlargement of 
our personal creeds. First get firm hold 
of some truths and powers of the Spirit in 
their earthly effects and present meanings : 
then you may stand ready to receive higher 
knowledge of divinity. This, I am insist- 
ing, is the vital method of gaining a real 
theology. How this method works ; how 
from the beginnings of some real belief in 
the nearer, earthly parts of the Christian 
doctrine we can gain further and longer 
Christian creeds, — may be better brought 
out, if we seek to apply this method of 
learning the doctrines to two or three of 
the chief teachings of Jesus and the apos- 
tles, — such as the Christian doctrine of 
God, the divine forgiveness of the sin of 
the world, and the future life. 

Before I attempt, however, to approach 
in the way just indicated these particular 



62 PEESOXAL CREEDS. 

articles of our Christian faith, several gen- 
eral observations concerning this real and 
vital way of doctrinal study should be 
made. 

I want to have you all see that this is 
the reasonable way of learning what we 
can of the doctrines of Christ. It is the 
honest endeavor on our part to enter first 
into the spirit of Christianity in order that 
we may understand truly and more fully 
the teachings of Christ. And that, I say, 
is thoroughlj^ reasonable ; indeed, it is the 
only reasonable way of understanding the 
doctrine of the Lord Jesus Christ. We 
are applying thus to the study of the 
Christian doctrines a first principle of 
intellectual criticism. One must put him- 
self into the spirit of a poem, or a piece 
of music, or of a Gothic cathedral, if he 
would catch its deeper meanings, or un- 
derstand its soul of melody, or if he would 
have any true appreciation of the " min- 
ster's vast repose." Shall a man dare to 
require less of himself in his approach 
to the Christianity of Christ? Unless he 
enters humbly, even as a little child, into 



HEAVENLY TRUTHS. 63 

the Spirit of the divine Teacher, he is not 
fit to discuss the Christian doctrines. Yet 
a man will talk glibly and fluently of the 
most exalted doctrines, or declaim against 
the Christian beliefs, when not for one 
honest, earnest day of pure, noble living 
with Jesus of Nazareth, has he sought to 
enter into the spirit of Christianity, and 
to learn the divine secret of that one glo- 
riously sacrificial life. If a person should 
write a philosophy of music, and dispute 
with musicians over the laws of harmony, 
who had never heard a sweet song singing 
itself in his own heart, he would justly be 
treated with contempt. The music must 
get into the man before the man can 
be a critic of the music. If a book- 
scholar should draw a series of architec- 
tural designs, and write a whole creed of 
architecture, who had himself never fol- 
lowed with delighted eye a line of beauty, 
or felt the dignity of pure and noble form, 
he and his work would be unnoticed by all 
art-loving Greek souls, or minds of Gothic 
aspiration. Should we entertain more re- 
gard for bodies of divinity which are not 



64 PERSONAL CREEDS. 

throughout the expression of the Spirit of 
Christianity ? Should a confession be hon- 
ored as a true symbol of faith unless it be- 
trays in every chapter, article, and line of 
it, the spirit of the Gospel, — the Spirit of 
Christ ? A creed that does not have the 
music of the Gospel in it is no creed for us 
publicans and sinners. Let us hear the 
song of the faith singing itself through 
your life, and then we will listen to your 
teaching of the doctrines. 

For instance, if I reach a belief in the 
existence of God as the conclusion of 
some argument, my belief will be a 
rational affirmation, but it may remain 
only the abstract summary of a course of 
high thinking ; a God so reached may 
remain only the necessary inference of 
my logic, but not be Him in whom I live, 
and move, and have my being. A God 
who exists for me only at the end of an 
argument, is not an immediate and felt 
presence in my soul. In this sense it is 
true that a proved God were no God. But 
if I lay hold by faith of the being of God 
through some special experience which 



HEAVENLY TRUTHS. 65 

has brought me to a realization of the 
intervention of some higher Power in my 
life, then my faith in God gains reality 
at the source of it, and is no more an intel- 
lectual explanation only of the mystery 
of the universe, but becomes an actual fact 
and energy of my personal life. I may 
recall some particular experience, or com- 
bination of events, which seemed to me 
providential. I cannot explain satisfac- 
torily to myself how those different events 
were put together, how they were timed 
for me so signally, unless a higher Intelli- 
gence, thinking of me, had something to 
do with their arrangement, unless the 
finger of God set the hands together at 
the right time on my clock. The events 
themselves may have been quite in the 
natural order of things ; mechanism may 
account for the wheels of the clock, and 
the hands ; but the timing of those events, 
the setting the hands to the true moment, 
implies in my life some higher thought 
and care. So much then my life may 
have taught me of God's providence. That 
belief will be real to me as my life from 



66 PERSONAL CREEDS. 

which it has come. Then let my further 
thought of God start from such divine 
actuality in my experience, and build 
itself up on that. Let other real experi- 
ences of my soul enter into it. Thus my 
theology, however imperfect it may be in 
form, will have from the beginning of it 
some vital substance of faith in it. 

And what we need now even more than 
sound theology is real theology. The 
church needs a real theology for its working- 
creed. Better one ounce of real theology 
than a whole pound of verbal theology. 
We hear the phrase often used in these 
days, " new theology " ; but to win for 
ourselves and our age a real theology is the 
present effort, the one aim, the thoughtful 
prayer of many Christian teachers. The 
name " new theology " is given to this vital 
movement by others ; no student with a 
historical conscience would choose that 
designation for his own thought. A. the- 
ology may be new or old; but the one im- 
portant thing is this, Is it real theology 
to us now? If our old theology should 
become to us only a repetition of our 



HEAVENLY TKUTHS. 67 

fathers' creeds, or but a sacred memory of 
a mother's beliefs, — hallowed and dear as 
such memory may be, — if our theology 
should represent only ''some Bethel where 
God has been," it would be for us the 
worst theology we could have ; for a per- 
sonal creed which has not become a living 
truth within us, and which should fail to 
answer to our honest thought, w^ould be 
worse than a mockery ; we should be bound 
to it as to a body of death from which the 
Spirit of life would set us free. A church 
that could retain a confession of faith 
which has ceased to be real in its pulpits, 
would lie not to men only, but to the Holy 
Ghost. So, likewise, any new theology 
might be equally worthless and hurtful, if 
it were only a substitution of some new 
phrase for some older form of words, and 
if it should not bear witness to some fresh 
access of spiritual life. What all Chris- 
tian churches need to do, is very humbly 
and honestly to get down to the real in 
their faiths, the real in the Scriptures, the 
real in Christian experience, the simple, 
final, divine reality in the life of the Christ. 



68 PERSONAL CREEDS. 

And in much that may seem on the sur- 
face to be destructive or perilous to our 
beliefs, we may find, if we look deeper, 
the signs of a spiritual return to real faith. 
When have so many men in our churches, 
so many preachers and religious teachers 
all over the world, seemed more desirous 
to see and to do the real Christian thing ? 

One other general remark should not be 
left unspoken. Our text shows that there 
may be differences in the nature or degree 
of our assurance concerning different parts 
of the teachings of Christ. One part 
comes down near to us, enters into our 
earthly experience, may be morally or 
spiritually verified by us in our present 
life. Other portions of the Lord's teach- 
ings are heavenly, and our belief in them 
rests on trust in Him. The simple, essen- 
tial truths come, at least at some points of 
them, into close contact with our earthly 
life. I shall proceed to show how this 
holds true of such articles of faith as the 
being of God, the divine forgiveness, and 
the moral retributions which stretch on 
into the future life. But just now my 



HEAVENLY TRUTHS. 69 

point is, that according to Christ's own 
principle of faith, as contained in this text, 
we may expect differences in thckind and 
degree of our beliefs corresponding to the 
different portions of his teaching. And 
this remark is very needful, because one 
trouble which many find in believing arises 
from their misunderstanding this : they 
have been taught, or they seem to think, 
that they must take the whole creed of 
the church with equal faith ; must believe 
in every article of the longest and fullest 
summary of Christian doctrine with the 
same definiteness, clearness, and precision 
of belief. But to require or expect men 
to believe everything with the same degree 
of faith, would be the shortest and surest 
way we could take to turn the Church of 
Christ into a synagogue, and to make 
Pharisees of all believers. Yet just this 
misunderstanding has worked unfortu- 
nately for the church ; the lingering re- 
mains of it are making much mischief in 
our Congregationalism at the present hour. 
For the Christian religion is too often put 
before men as a system of doctrine, each 



70 PERSONAL CREEDS. 

separate part of which is necessary to the 
whole, and doubt as to the least portion of 
which imperils everything. Men are led 
to suppose that they must believe a whole 
table of doctrines with equal positiveness, 
and be as sure, for instance, of some dogma 
concerning the future life as they may be 
sure of the existence of God. 

If the whole series of articles which 
men have deduced from Biblical proof- 
texts were put before us in this deter- 
mined way, as though we could be equallj^ 
sure of all and must believe the whole, or 
have no part in the faith of the church, 
then we should be perfectly justified in 
telling such confident teachers of religion 
to wait until the judgment-day for our 
answer to their conditions of Christian 
fellowship. If we were not permitted to 
enter through the church-door as little 
children into the kingdom of heaven, then 
we could at least refuse to go in with the 
scribes to the synagogue, and we might 
choose rather to stay outside with the 
publicans and sinners until our Lord may 
find us and speak some simple word of 



HEAVENLY TRUTHS. 71 

his grace which we may understand, and 
which will be gospel enough for us in our 
present struggle fcr some higher mastery 
of life. 

In this present stage of our divine edu- 
cation for eternal life we ought not, in- 
deed, to expect to see all Christ's teachings 
with equal distinctness. He said some 
things which his first disciples did not 
understand. Some believers have more 
clear ideas on many doctrines than it is 
well for them to have. Clear ideas with 
regard to some dim and distant portions 
of religious truth are very possibly false 
ideas. We would like indeed to have 
definite religious beliefs at every point of 
doctrine. How many heavenly things we 
would like to know as certainly as we 
know some earthly things ! But evidently 
the Bible is not a nautical almanac by 
which on any sea we can make precise 
calculations of the heavens. Certainly the 
Bible is not a definition of God, or a com- 
plete map of his decrees, or a perfect 
system of block signals and interlocking 
switches all along tlie way of salvation. 



72 PERSONAL CREEDS. 

The Bible is not equally clear, definite, 
authoritative, concerning all the doctrines. 
The Bible is like nature, having in it 
depth, distance, and perspective. And 
faith cannot go up and down through the 
Bible like a civil engineer with compass 
and measuring-tape, to return with the 
exact dimensions of all truths; but faith 
must go often to the Bible, as the poet 
goes to nature, to see what is revealed, to 
gain new views of old landscapes, to par- 
take of the life which flows through all, 
to come back from every fresh communion 
with the spirit of it more loving, trust- 
ing, and worshipful. It is well to see as 
much truth clearly as we possibly can ; 
but with regard to some whole ranges of 
far, heavenly truths, too definite assertions 
may betray the pride of the reasoner rather 
than the humility of an observer ; and too 
certain beliefs carried in confident contro- 
versy beyond the distinctness of revelation 
may become stumbling-blocks and causes 
of division among disciples who ought to 
be glad to be sent forth in the one Name 
to do the Lord's good works in many lands 



HEAVENLY TRUTHS. 73 

by the one Spirit. Some of us, it is true, 
may be too content to remain in a condi- 
tion of moral and religious nebulousness 
where we ought to have clear-cut Chris- 
tian decisions; we want especially to see 
young lives crystallizing into clear, firm. 
Christian character. But some of us also 
may be losing vitality and power of trust 
from labored and foolish endeavors to 
keep toiling on along the Christian Avay 
under a burden of over-beliefs. We might 
have more faith, if our beliefs could be 
simplified. We need not so strain our 
eyes to make sure of so many things. It 
is enough to be as a disciple. God does 
not require human faith to turn itself into 
a telescope for the search of his heavens, 
but he does ask faith to see the human 
duties and their heavenly signs which He 
is always showing right before us. 

We ought to be Christian mystics in 
some things. You go out from this 
church and look down the street under 
the elms ; some things you can see clearly, 
so plainly that you can walk easily along 
your way homewards. But you look way 



74 PERSONAL CREEDS. 

up the street, and you may see that some 
things are there, although you cannot tell 
exactly what they are. You fail to dis- 
tinguish the people, the moving forms, in 
the distance ; and, far off, the housetops 
and the trees begin to run together. I 
ought not to try to do in my theolog)' 
what I cannot do in walking a street, or in 
passing across a single broad field — make 
everything equally definite and clear. Pil- 
grims like us, going home along some way 
of God, may perceive plainly enough the 
nearest truths which we need to know, that 
we may w^alk uprightly and along the 
homeward way ; but God has set his hori- 
zons for our faith. We may knoAV that 
some heavenly things are, and we are 
drawing nearer them, although we cannot 
yet tell surely what they are. We may 
have spiritual perception enough to warrant 
us in believing in more divine realities 
than we can define in our theologies. 
Mysticism is the true mood, and clear ideas 
may be false perceptions, where earth's 
far mountain-tops are lost in heaven's pur- 
pling haze. Dogmatism, too far beyond 



HEAVENLY TRUTHS. 75 

present practical Christianity, may be any- 
thing but fidelity to God's Word. The 
Bible is not a handy camera with one fixed 
universal focus, by means of Avhich a 
believer may take a tolerable snap judg- 
ment of every subject, and falsify per- 
spective, and lose the mellow distant view. 
I leave these more general remarks 
especially for the consideration of those 
who have already some Christian faith, 
and who would like to gain more, but 
Avho have hesitated over our systems of 
belief, or perhaps been kept by doctrinal 
difficulties from confessing Christ and sit- 
ting with his church at the Lord's table. 
Such remarks I know may very easily be 
misunderstood or perverted. But, never- 
tlieless, if thoughtful and sincere men are 
to be made at home in the Lord's church, 
some things of this nature need to get 
themselves said in all our churches. For 
there is now a good deal of unformulated 
and even unbaptized Christianity in the 
thought and life of men outside of the 
church. Christ is becoming more real in 
many ways to tliis generation. ITis doc- 



76 PERSONAL CEEEDS. 

trine, although perhaps not so fully appre- 
hended as it might be, is entering effectively 
into much of the best striving and working 
of men who are standing aloof from the 
churches. And within the church itself 
there is beginning to make itself felt and 
efficacious a revival of simpler and more 
real Christian life. At first our creeds may 
seem to be put in jeopardy by this new 
work of the Holy Ghost without and within 
the church. But it is truer to say that all 
our beliefs are going to be purged rather, 
and more thoroughly Christianized. Mean- 
while, and in the midst of these processes 
of the purging of the faith of all branches 
of God's church, believers need persistently 
to go down and find again the real vital 
things in their personal creeds, and to live 
fearlessly from these with their Lord. "• The 
apostles," we read, " were with him." That 
is the way in which they became apostles ; 
they had been chosen to live with him. So 
the teachers and leaders of men in the new, 
coming Christian age will be those who 
more than others live with the ^Master, in 
the Spirit of the Lord. 



IV. 

GOD IN OUR LIVES. 



Before our God and Father. — i Thbss. i. 3. 



IV. 

GOD IN OUR LIVES. 

IT is a great gain when God becomes 
real to a man. That may be the imme- 
diate gain which death shall bring to us ; 
and he who through the mystery of this 
mortal life has been seeking for the living 
God will find it worth the pains and dark- 
ness of death to discover God as the One 
luminous and sweet Reality, fairer than 
any dawn, filling his vision at his awaken- 
ing. And it were worth all effort and any 
cost to gain here before we die a real sense 
of God. For to men in general God, al- 
though believed in, is not real. To take 
the name of the Almighty on one's lips, 
to think of God as the great First Cause 
which the creation once had, to believe in 
the Divine Being as the necessary ground 
and sufficient reason of existence, — this is 

rational, this it is reasonable for us to do. 

79 



80 PERSONAL CEEEDS. 

But this is not for us to walk before God 
in all our ways. He is profoundly relig- 
ious, the essence of all faith is in that man, 
who from some experience of his life has 
learned to say, like the Psalmist of old, '' O 
Lord, Thou art my God." The Almighty 
is not a real Being to us unless faith, by 
the use of the personal pronoun, has brought 
God home to the human heart, — perhaps 
by some stress of experience has been com- 
pelled to bring God, who is in the heavens, 
down into the little circle of our longing 
life. To the disciples who had seen Jesus, 
life was evermore before '' our God ^ and 
Father." 

In forming our personal creed, or work- 
ing-theory for life, we must seek above all 
to gain, if possible, a real God for our daily 
life. Is God real to me ? How can I put 
my life out upon some full, divine Reality? 

Having in previous sermons spoken of 
some possible points for the real beginnings 
of a personal creed, and having suggested 
also that a living faith will grow up- 
wards from those truths which are em- 
bedded in our present experience ; or that 



GOD IN OUR LIVES. 81 

belief in the earthly portions of Jesus' doc- 
trine is the condition of advance to faith 
in the more heavenly portions of his teach- 
ing ; I am brought now to the point where 
this method of faith may be tested and put 
to definite use in its application to our be- 
lief in God. We are to seek to know the 
being and nature of God, not by ascending 
up into the heavens, to bring God down 
to us from beyond the stars, but rather by 
finding what we may of God here on this 
little earth, and in the happenings of our 
own insignificant lives. 

In no other way can God become a real 
God to us. For even if you prove to my 
satisfaction that once a God made this 
world, that proof of the existence ages ago 
of a Creator would not make God now 
present to me, " my God." I have every 
reason to believe that years ago somebody 
built the house in which I dwell. But 
what is that somebody to me ? I may be 
thankful indeed if he built well ; I may 
wonder why he built in all respects as he 
did: but the maker and builder of my 
house is not a living presence in the house. 



82 PERSONAL, CKEEDS. 

The worth of the home is always in the 
living presence Avhich informs and irradi- 
ates it. The real God is the living pres- 
ence in the world. It is some felt presence 
of the Father that onr souls seek after, not 
the signs that once some Creator was. If 
we men are to have a real God, we must 
find Him somewhere touching us ; He is not 
our God, He were only the end of our phi- 
losophy, or the assumption of our reason, or 
the dogma of our intellect, if we may not 
feel the touch of his Spirit on our spirit, if 
He is not the one permanent reality of ex- 
perience to us. Though by some marvel- 
lous sign in the heavens the name of the 
Lord should be flung out across the depths 
of the sky ; should the nebula of Orion 
take miraculous form and its star-dust be 
fashioned into letters of light, so that, look- 
ing up, earth might read in the heavens 
this Scripture, " Know ye that the Lord, 
he is God " : even such wonder of rev- 
elation above would not make God real to 
us ; for men might gaze, and read, and turn 
again to their own devices, and serve their 
idols of the market-place and the school. 



GOD IN OUR LIVES. 83 

We want God in all onr thoughts — the 
living God, felt at our heart-beatings, and 
not a God far off in the heavens. 

If we had to go forth and hunt for signs 
of the true God ; if we were obliged first 
to prove that a God must exist, and then 
to believe in our proof of God ; we might 
indeed despair of our effort by searching to 
know liim. I cannot find a God who has 
not first found me. We could not prove 
the existence of God, did He not first show 
himself to us. Atheism starts out to dis- 
cover the end of creation's ways, and soon 
stops at a dead wall; unbelief is the en- 
forced pause of reason before an insur- 
mountable wall. Unless God himself opens 
some door and comes to man, we cannot go 
beyond the world to Him. If we can find, 
however, some points in our human life 
where God exists in touch Avith us, then 
faith may succeed in taking the offei'ed 
hand of God. If the hand of God has been 
stretched out towards me in my life, then 
my reason may go out towards Him, and 
my faith reach up and lay hold of the arm 
of the Almighty. 



84 PERSONAL CREEDS. 

Our first question of religious faith nar- 
rows itself accordingly to this : Has any- 
thing diviner than myself ever touched me ? 
Has something Godlike at any point taken 
hold of human life? In other words, are 
there any places or portions of our earthly 
experience which indicate divine contacts 
with us ? If so, by those parts of our hu- 
man historjT-, through these passages of my 
life, I may know my God. 

But to put the question in this way is to 
answer it, at least so far as common human 
experience seems to be not entirely in- 
sulated from contact with some higher 
Power. This earth is bound by lines of 
electric influence to supernal Forces. Hu- 
man life indicates points of spiritual con- 
tact. The points of light in history — the 
illuminations of the high, prophetic souls 
— are the points at which the transcendent 
influences pervading human life break into 
visibility. Indeed, so conscious are we of 
our human dependence upon something 
which is not human, that it ceases to be 
with men practically a^ question between 
atheism and some religion. The main con- 



GOD m OUR LIVES. 85 

cern of man is not, Have I a God? but, 
Who, or what, is the God who holds me in 
his power? What is he like? Something 
superhuman has us in its grasp ; it seems 
sometimes to hold us as in a vise. We 
cannot escape the higher law. We must. 
That one word must — so hard often, so 
constant a pressure of necessity from the 
seen and the unseen powers upon us — is 
itself evidence of some Sovereignty on 
which we are dependent — some supernal 
Power which seizes our wills, and rises 
strong as fate, and firm as the everlasting- 
rock, against any resistance of our desires 
of life. We must. Some Omnipotence has 
laid hold of us. So much of the pressure 
of the supreme Power upon us we may find 
in common experience. You feel it in 
your business. There is an incalculable 
element in business. Something from the 
Unknown enters into the making of everj^ 
fortune. Alert men, indeed, seize oppor- 
tunity ; wise men may calculate the tide to 
be taken at its flood ; but there is an un- 
earthly power in tlie flowing of tlie tides. 
Amid the known forces of history menses 



86 PERSOXAL CREEDS. 

the incalculable and nnmeasurable Power. 
'' A certain I know not what," the Em- 
peror Frederick the Great said, sports with 
human projects. '' I sincerely believe," 
wrote Sir Fowell Buxton to his daughter, 
concerning a division wliich took place in 
the House of Commons during the con- 
flict for West Indian emancipation, " I 
sincerelj' believe tliat irrayer was the cause 
of that division; and I am confirmed in 
this, by knowing that we by no means 
calculated on the effect. The course we 
took appeared to be right, and ^^e followed 
it blindly y 

This truth of the existence of some One 
higher Power lies at the beginning and the 
end of all our science, although no science 
can disclose further its secret. Onh^ a few 
years ago our physical science was quite 
content to count the elements as so many 
ultimates of nature ; but now these ele- 
ments, between sixty and seventy of them, 
begin to disclose mutual relations, and to 
arrange themselves as in a series, and our 
science presses the question still further, 
AVhat is their one law, or last common 



GOD IN OUR LIVES. 87 

form? But no chemist has found that: it 
were coming perhaps too near the being of 
the living God for us to weigh or to deter- 
mine the last element of the elements, the 
final unity of things. And if we could 
perceive the entities which are the assump- 
tions of our physical science ; if we could 
apprehend directly the One universal En- 
titj^ into which our science would resolve 
ultimately all the elements of nature ; we 
might in this way of approach towards the 
Creator, through the creation, come nearer 
than ever the metaphysicians have to the 
desire of the saints in the vision of God. 

It is not, then, so much the fact of the 
existence of a God which thoughtful men 
will call in question ; — '^ the period of 
doubt,'' said Goethe, ''is past; men now 
doubt as little the existence of God as 
their own ; " — but the focal, burning relig- 
ious question is, and always has been, 
What is God? Who is He, that I may 
worship Him? Show us what God is like. 

There are four points in our present 
earthly experience by which God lays hold 
of us, and by which, therefore, Ave may lay 



88 PERSONAL CREEDS. 

hold on God. There are, at least, these 
four God-given and God-lighted facts of 
human life and history. They are, the 
thinking, willing mind; the conscience of 
man; the love of the human heart; and 
the Christ in history. At these points of 
our earthly knowledge we may seek to ap- 
prehend our God. To attempt to draw out 
fully from these God-lighted facts of life 
their full truth of divinity, would require 
a volume rather than a sermon: my pres- 
ent object is simpler ; I would seek to indi- 
cate merely, and to illustrate this way of 
living contact with our God. At such 
points as these God exists in touch with 
us, and we may apprehend him. 

First, suppose that you sit down and 
think a while. Think hard; think with 
all your might. No matter what the sub- 
ject of your thought may be — a problem 
of astronomy, an object on earth, a ques- 
tion of business; — let the subject of which 
you think be what it may; — but think; 
think intently; think with your will in 
your thought, holding you to it, not letting 
you go from it; think until you cease to 



GOD m OUR LIVES. 89 

hear the ticking of the clock, or to take 
note of the things around you ; think until 
the hour passes unheeded and unmeasured 
as though you yourself were a timeless 
thought, no more bound in space or to 
time, but free as your thought, here, there, 
across the seas, at Avill in what was, or is 
to be, searching the depths, or in the 
heavenly places ; think thus until lost in 
thought, and then stop ; come back ; be 
again in the body. As you compare your 
common consciousness with that high ex- 
istence in intense, absorbing thought, what 
have you gained? What but a measure 
for that which God is, a finite measure 
from your moment of timeless existence in 
thought for his eternal Being. Such is 
God ahvays and Avithout effort, and per- 
fectly, the willing Thought of all things, 
the thinking Will in whom all things have 
their being. 

This much at least I may apprehend of 
Him from, my finite thought. From our 
human experience of mind and will we 
may discern in this direction what the true 
God is, — not blind fate, not thoughtless 



90 PERSONAL CREEDS. 

force, but the Mind that thinks, and holds 
all things in its eternal thought. 

Yet this is only one of several begin- 
nings in our present experience of possi- 
ble knowledge of the nature of God. 

Conscience is another. It is not the 
whole truth to say we have a conscience ; 
more truly has it been said that conscience 
has us. Through conscience the liigher 
laAV lays hold of us. At that point in our 
life where dut}^ appears, we are appre- 
hended by God. Let us then apprehend 
God at this contact of our moral experience 
with the Higher Power. The Supreme 
One cannot be conscienceless, for I have 
conscience. Let duty command us with a 
glorious power. Let the inward law con- 
trol the appetites of the flesh. Let the one 
right thing be the only thing we can think 
of doing. Then in the triumph over god- 
less temptation, in some full sense of the 
right achieved, let us draw near our God. 
Not less than this can He be. He is moral 
Power. No sovereignty of lawless Will 
holds us in its arbitrary election ; but from 
eternity the Power that rules is Righteous- 



GOD IX OUR LIVES. 91 

ness. He lays hold of me through con- 
science, and therefore will I lay hold also of 
Him through conscience. He is the living 
Right. God is conscience, all consciences 
concentrated into the One pure, burning, 
eternal Conscience. God is the Conscience 
of the universe. Beneath that I am living; 
that eye is upon me. 

How shall I, a sinner, escape from his 
presence? How can I look into that eye 
of God? 

Yet conscience, pure, awful, — the fire 
consuming sin, — is not all of the Godhead 
to be found in our human experience. 
There is another place in our life where 
the Divine flows in. There is another 
God-revealing fact of the human heart. 
Let a man know what it is to love. Xot 
indeed to indulge in self-pleasing senti- 
ment; not to say, I believe in charity, I 
love my brethren, while he takes advantage 
of any one who does business with him, 
or refuses to put his strength beneath those 
whom he ought to uphold. Not to say, 
I love m}' fellow-men, while he does not 
drop into the contribution box so nuicli as 



92 PERSOKAL CREEDS. 

the interest which his fortune accrues while 
he sits listening to the Gospel. Let a man 
love in some genuine unselfishness ; let liim 
make himself a real providence to some- 
body ; let him put his heart into something 
noble, and count not the cost in its service ; 
let him devote himself to something worthy 
a man's life in the world — his home, his 
family, his cause of right, his city, his 
country ; let him so love that he can snap 
all the small cords of self-interest, and for- 
get his own happiness, and even could give 
his life rather than prove unfaithful ; and 
then by a man's true passion of soul, let 
him know the Eternal nobleness. "We 
love," said a disciple, " because he first 
loved us." From such experience of 
noblest life, it is true, no radiant robe may 
be woven in which the Eternal One may aj)- 
pear as in visible form ; — the truest things 
of the soul which we know best are all of 
them unseen, and so is our God invisible ; 
— but we may thus gain some vital, loving 
contact with God through the human heart 
by which we live. Conceive of him, the 
Adorable, as the Heart of hearts, the One 



GOD IN OUR LIVES. 93 

true, perfect Heart of the universe; God, 
who is the Mind and the Conscience, is also 
the great Heart of all. Gather up in your 
thought all affections of the family, all 
devotions of life, the intimate sympathies, 
the tenderness, the strength of human 
love ; put all pure human hearts together, 
as the one collective heart of humanity ; 
and by that true Heart of hearts know 
what God is. You have in that the image 
of his truest Being. " Yet," saith the 
Scripture, '' God is greater than our heart, 
and knoweth all things." 

Now it were idle for any one to tell me 
that knowledge of the Higher Unknown 
Power gained in this human way is not 
real knowledge. What, I would like to 
know, is real, if love is fiction ? What is 
true if hearts be false ? If what one holds 
of life in his heart be not real, life's truest 
truth, then what he has in his eye is but 
film, and what his hands grasp is but 
shadow. There can be nothing more real 
than God known through love. 

" I do not have to go around the world," 
said Goethe, '' to know that the sky is 



94 PERSONAL CREEDS. 

blue." We do not have to understand 
the full mystery of God's being around us 
to know what God is. A single loving 
human heart were enough to prove that 
God, from whom it came, is love. 

If, therefore, we had only these near 
earthly ends of the truth of divinity in 
our experience, and must stop with these, 
we should have ground and reason enough 
for religion, and for houses of worship. 
Mind, conscience, love, — these three are 
enough to make atheism unhuman. These 
facts of the Divine existence within our 
present life are enough to lead men to 
hope, to look beyond earthly horizons, to 
lift up hands of prayer, and to await 
further and fuller revelations in some 
world to come. And having so much, 
we are evidently made to receive more. 
Irreligion means a half-filled being. Ir- 
religion means that man is a broken thing ; 
a creation begun and left half done. Re- 
ligion means that a being made to be filled 
shall not be left of heaven two-thirds 
empty; that a life begun in the spirit is 
not to end in the flesh. Irreligion is a li- 



GOD IjST ouh lives. 95 

bel on human nature as well as distrust of 
heaven. So if we had only nature's pro- 
phetic best, we should not be justified in 
falling back into irreligion which is man's 
worst. We ought to live and die expect- 
ing with Socrates, even if we could not 
believe with Jesus of Nazareth. 

The further, and the greatest, God- 
revealing fact in our human history is our 
Lord Jesus Christ. Whatever one may 
think about Jesus, it is certain that God, 
the heavenly Father, was real to him, and 
that in his presence his God became real 
to others. God was very present to the 
disciples who walked with Christ. Jesus 
made God in his righteousness so near and 
real to some Pharisees and hypocrites that 
they could not endure it, and took counsel 
together to kill him. The life of Christ 
is a realization on our earth of what God 
in heaven is. God is Christlike. Against 
any appearances of things, or seeming 
difficulties even of Scripture, the disciple 
of Jesus may dare believe that God is 
most Christian, — lovable, adorable as 
the Christ, — the One Righteousness and 



96 PERSONAL CREEDS. 

Friendliness, who is wortliy of a man's 
utmost devotion and a woman's whole 
love. And it is of more essential impor- 
tance for US to gain from Jesus this Chris- 
tian idea of God than it is to understand 
how God was in Christ. The Holy Ghost 
seems to be teaching anew amid all our 
human theologies tliis truth of the perfect 
Christlikeness of our God. 

So, then, in the desire to speak some 
words of helpfulness to those who would 
find God a nearer and daily reality of their 
lives, I have not sought to guide you along 
the ways of high reasoning which lead to 
belief in the existence of God, although it 
is well for those who can to pursue those 
well-trodden paths. Our word for to-day 
concerning belief in God is simply tliis : 
there are places in our common human 
experience which are as open windows for 
his light to find us ; there are facts of life 
and historj^, and, above all, the great Christ- 
fact of history, in which God exists in 
touch and contact with man. As we live 
in these experiences, as we are ready to 
receive divine influence at these possible 



GOD IX OIJE LIVES. 97 

points of its apprehension of us, we may 
find our God becoming real and true to us, 
and present every day. Christlike living 
yields Christlike knowledge of the Father 
in heaven. Bj^ his Spirit within us, the 
first article of religious faith, I believe in 
the Father, may become, as it was to Jesus 
of Nazareth, no vague philosophizing, but 
the truth of our truest being. Our friends 
who have gone from us into the unseen 
may see, upon their first awakening in that 
clearer life, all things before them lighted 
up with God. But though we wait for 
the perfect vision, already there are por- 
tions of our earthly experience which grow 
luminous with something diviner ; some hu- 
man experiences are aglow with the Spirit ; 
and in the Christ was the light of God. 
Amid these earthly shadows there are these 
God-lighted facts of experience and history, 
the life of Jesus being the most God-reveal- 
ing of all facts known to us men. The 
Life, John has told us, was the Light of men. 
As we catch in ours the reflection of that 
Life, we shall not be left in utter darkness. 
As with much repentance, true endeavor, 



98 PERSONAL CBEEDS. 

and genuine desire, we not only read the 
divine teachings, but enter into tlie spirit 
of Jesus' life, we shall know his Father 
and ours ; the Avorld at moments may grow 
tragic around our hearts, but it will never 
seem deserted. Our trial and discipline 
here will not seem aimless or useless, and 
death no end of existence to be dreaded, 
or to be accepted as a finaLsleep; but the 
older we grow, death will become to us 
life's increasing expectation. And prayer, 
likewise, will become natural as thought, 
sacred as duty, intimate as love, personal 
as the name of Christ. 



V. 



HUMAN FORGIVENESS A MEAS- 
URE FOR THE DIVINE. 



But that ye may know that the Son of man hath 
power on earth to forgive sins. — Matt. ix. 6. 



V. 



HUMAK FOEGIVEIS^ESS A MEASURE 
FOE THE DIYIXE. 

IN pursuance of the method for the for- 
mation of a real creed which I am seek- 
ing to follow, we approach now a distinctive 
doctrine of the Gospel, which has occasioned 
more discussion in Christian theology, and 
which has met more objections in the minds 
of men, than almost any other truth of 
God's Word; viz., the doctrine of the 
atonement. Let me remind you again of 
the simple and practical method by which 
we may seek to win for ourselves real be- 
liefs ; we should try to lay hold of divine 
truths by the near, earthly ends of them, 
and thus through those parts of the truth 
which are brought within our present expe- 
rience of life we may hope to be put in 
some spiritual communication with the 
more heavenly portions of Jesus' teachings. 

101 



102 PERSONAL CREEDS. 

This method of begiiinmg at the human 
ends of divine truths seems to me to be 
particularly needed in our effort to under- 
stand the atoning work of Christ. For the 
trouble with much of our preaching of the 
doctrine of the atonement lies in the un- 
reality of it. It may fit into the necessi- 
ties of some philosophy or theology, but 
many thoughtful men fail to gain, in their 
experience of life, ideas that have any 
actual correspondence to some scheme of 
salvation which they are asked to accept. 
And with a high sense of moral honor they 
prefer to go without any belief in a divine 
plan of salvation rather than to profess 
belief in some conceptions which take no 
actual hold on their experience of life. 
Some once prevalent theories of the atone- 
ment have become unsubstantial to us, sim- 
ply because the ideas of government, sov- 
ereignty, and political procedures, in which 
such theories of the atonement had their 
origin, have passed away. A monarchical 
theory, for instance, of God's government 
and his method of punishing or pardoning, 
can have little significance to men who 



FOllGIVENESS. 103 

have been trained under democratic insti- 
tutions. 

What we need is to find some points of 
attachment in our present life for divine 
truths. Is there any part of the doctrine 
of the divine forgiveness of sins which lies 
within our present personal reach, by means 
of which we may apprehend the higher 
teaching ? I have chosen a text which may 
put us in the way of the answer we need 
to find. For the text is a striking illustra- 
tion of the manner in which Jesus himself 
began to teach men his Gospel of the divine 
forgiveness of sins. '' That ye nvdj know," 
he said, '' that the Son of man hath power 
on earth to forgive sins." I stop with that 
part of the verse ; it is text enough for us 
now. Jesus did not say the Son of God 
hath power to forgive sins ; he did not say, 
Jehovah can impart the kingly prerogative 
of forgiveness ; but he put the divine for- 
giveness before them as a most human 
thing, — the Son of man is he who, in his 
perfect and sympathetic humanness, for- 
gives. In that house there was an assem- 
bly of Jewish doctors of divinity, and also 



104 PERSONAL CEEEDS. 

there had been let down in the midst of 
them a disagreeably sick and paralytic man. 
Had Jesns for that poor man's benefit 
opened the book of the law, and reasoned 
of sin and its expiation, donbtless those 
learned scribes could have followed liim 
from text to text of Moses' commandments. 
Had Jesus proceeded to formulate a careful 
statement of what might be necessary to 
honor the broken law, and to propitiate 
God's justice, in order that the sins of that 
palsied man, and the sins of his fathers 
for Avhich he suffered, might be remit- 
ted, probably those learned doctors of the 
laAv would have understood his use of their 
sacrificial code and would not have thought 
of accusing him of blasphemy. But Jesus 
did no such thing. He left the future 
Christendom to think out such matters at 
its leisure, while as the Son of man he at 
once spoke the word of forgiveness to that 
helpless, trusting man. Jesus assumed the 
possibility of forgiveness as a well-known 
human experience, and proceeded at once 
to exercise his forgiving spirit as though 
there could be to him no question of its 



FOKGIVENESS. 105 

divine right. As the Son of man he has 
authority to forgive sins. 

So Jesus in our text takes the doctrine 
of God's forgiveness out of all abstractions, 
and puts it in its human reality and life- 
likeness before our faith. As the Son of 
man, himself sinless, and righteous, yet 
with a sinlessness full of sweet sympath}^ 
and a righteousness aglow with mercy, he 
said, while the poor paralytic looked up 
into his gracious face, as though the heavens 
had been opened to him, '' Thy sins are 
forgiven thee." Such is Jesus' simple, ele- 
mental teaching of his doctrine of the 
atonement. Human forgiveness carries in 
it a divine sanction. Divine forgiveness 
is most human. The Christ forgiving sins 
as the Son of man stands as representative 
of God, and speaks on this earth for God 
in heaven. 

The Pharisees and scribes did not under- 
stand so simple a lesson in divinity. They 
never can. Theii' God is not human enough. 
Their God is but Sovereignty and Law. 
Before such humanness of the Christ they 
answered. Who can forgive sins but God 



106 PERSONAL CREEDS. 

only ? The scribes and Pharisees had no 
eyes to see the most Godlike attribute 
revealed in that most gracious human act 
of Jesus. No scheme of salvation for them 
to expound, was declared in the divine 
sweetness of that immediate word of the 
Son of man, Thy sins are forgiven. 

The same truth, that our human forgive- 
ness carries in it the authority and may be 
a measure of the divine forgiveness, is defi- 
nitely taught in the Lord's prayer : " For- 
give us our debts, as we forgive our 
debtors." So the divine forgiveness has 
its counterpart in the human ; the lesser is 
of the same kind as the greater ; the human 
is measure for the divine; — '' Forgive us 
our debts, as we forgive our debtors." 

We learn, then, from such Scriptures 
how Jesus at first would teach us, and how 
we should be content to begin, at least, 
our study of the doctrine of God's forgive- 
ness of the sin of the world. We may 
best enter upon the study of God's love 
for the world by mastering the simple 
elements of divinity which a forgiving 
spirit may learn in a reconciling ministry 



FOKGIVENESS. 107 

among neighbors and friends. And we 
must gain in some actual experiences and 
exercises of the grace of forgiveness the 
materials for our belief in God's reconcilia- 
tion of the world to himself, or all the 
Scriptures concerning Christ will remain 
mere words to us. The church in times 
past has been as orthodox as was St. 
Anselm's profound reasoning concerning 
Christ's satisfaction; and as dogmatic as 
was Calvin's devout logic of the divine 
decrees and Christ's death for the elect ; 
and as sure of the whole counsel of redemp- 
tion as has been the most conscientious 
scribe of our New England system of the 
divine government. But it will be better 
for the church, a thousand times better for 
the progress of the Lord's kingdom on 
earth, if through some further sacrificial 
and reconciling ministry among the social 
sins and sufferings of our world it can pro- 
ceed to gain some fresh and deeper insight 
into the heart of God's redeeming love in 
Christ. 

We cannot safely ignore the fact that 
even Christian beliefs of men may have 



108 PERSONAL CREEDS. 

no more connection Avith their characters 
than the reflections of the skies are part 
and substance of the pool of water into 
which they happen to be cast. Put your 
cup down into that smooth pool, and you 
won't dip up the sky, — only water, and 
perhaps insipid and unhealthy water ! 
Stir up that man of the heavenly creed, 
and in a moment the beliefs disappear in 
his temper. We want to take the heav- 
enly truth into us, not as water may the 
sky, but as the tree holds the sunshine in 
its vital sap. The truth of the Divine 
Spirit which shall be converted into the 
souls of men will become fruitful for the 
salvation of the world. And what can 
that man really know of the doctrine of 
the divine forgiveness of sins, although 
he be as a pillar of the truth in the church, 
if he himself is like a piece of cold, sharp, 
relentless steel in his business, if he goes 
down the street with an eye single to his 
own gain, and is deaf to the cry of distress 
which he himself may increase by liis ruth- 
less speculation in the bread of the people ? 
What can he know of the cost to God's 



FORGIVENESS. 109 

heart of our redemption, if he has no hand 
stretched out with all its might to save any 
one ? Though he may have been familiar 
from childhood with the Scriptures con- 
cerning Christ's death, though he may 
even dare to press the cup of the com- 
munion of Christ's sufferings to his mer- 
ciless lips, he may know less of the real 
and eternal truth of God's great sacrificial 
heart, from which the Christ comes, than 
that ragged Arab on the street knew, who 
stood for hours in rain and sleet to pick 
up a few pennies to save another child — 
his younger brother — who without his 
help might starve. Until we have found 
and followed Christ the Lord, bearing his 
cross somewhere upon this earth, we may 
not hope to know him in the heavenly 
places. 

Having taken so large a portion of my 
sermon in stating thus the method of our 
human approach to the divine truth of the 
gospel of forgiveness, I must now put into 
small space suggestions of much that may 
be learned in this vital way concerning the 



110 PERSONAL CREEDS. 

Christian doctrine of the divine forgiveness 
of the world's sin. 

First. In this way sin may become 
known to us as a personal offence which, 
if one cherishes a forgiving spirit, he would 
like to see put out of the way forever. 
There are other ways in which we may 
learn what the sin of the world is ; but 
when we are most profoundly convinced 
of a sin, we feel it as something personally 
wrong. We may know sin scientifically, 
as a hopeless blow against the iron law 
of things. Strike nature, and nature 
strikes back. Action and reaction are 
equal on that plane ; — we reap w^hat we 
sow. Moreover, as citizens under a gov- 
ernment Ave know sin as crime ; a law is 
broken, and f)unishment with a rough meas- 
ure of justice follows as a governmental 
decree. Yet not always ; for other elements 
emerge on this governmental plane, and 
pardon sometimes may be expedient, al- 
though punishment is just. But we know 
sin also, and this is the deepest knowledge 
we have of it, as a personal offence. " .A 
man's sin is something that wrongs some- 



FORGIVENESS. Ill 

I 

body. He may injure himself by it ; and 
it is an offence against his brother. The 
more personally we conceive of our sins, 
the more we shall dislike them, and wish 
we were well rid of them. They are per- 
sonal Avrongs. They hurt others. They 
destroy ourselves. They cut across the 
vital cords. They break hearts. Sin 
is a personal affront. Peter denied his 
Lord ; and the Lord looked on Peter, 
and Peter remembered; and he went out 
and Avept bitterly : — such is the tragic per- 
sonal history of sin, and its condemna- 
tion, and the bitter penitence which may 
follow it. The sin of the world is the of- 
fence of man against the person of God. 
It is the prodigal's wrong against the 
Father. Sin is worse than breaking a 
law; it is wrong personal, and real, as a 
wounded heart is real ; the sin of the world, 
of which each and all of our particular 
sins are parts, is a personal offence against 
that adorable and lovable and perfect Be- 
ing whom Jesus knew as our Father and 
his Father. The sin of the world not 
only throws us men into confused and 



112 PERSONAL CREEDS. 

jarring personal relations, making our liu- 
manity like a body disordered and full of 
pains ; but the sin of the world, if it had 
might as it had will, would inyolye the 
whole order of the heavens, and break the 
heart of the living God. This is the per- 
sonal thing, the awful thing, the damnable 
thing, to be forgiven. 

Secondly. The forgiving spirit among 
men carries in itself a divine sanction. 
The Son of man in forgiving is true to God. 
Do not preach to me, does some one say, a 
gospel of forgiveness. Nature I know, and 
law I know. Nature does not lose its uni- 
formity, and forgive. Law does not va- 
cate its authority, and remit punishment. 
I must suffer for my sins. I must accept 
the consequences of my acts. So indeed 
we must. Every man of us. And while 
we have to do merely with nature, or law, 
or government, we must answer their re- 
quirements, and be dealt with according to 
their necessities and their limitations. But 
these things — nature, law, divine govern- 
ment — are not the last realities ; they 
would be but abstractions, and as nothing, 



FORGIVENESS. 113 

were it not for that which is the first and 
the last and the one permanent reality of the 
universe, — even God himself. The final 
reality of which all others are expressions 
or shadows, is Personality, — God's infinite 
personality, our personal being in his 
image. We are not natures having to do 
with natures, or laws put under laws, but 
we are persons living with persons, men 
with men, and all of us before our God and 
Father. Nature I know, and law I know ; 
but I know also forgiveness in human 
homes. I find forgiveness possible among 
men. Whatever room there may or may 
not be for remission of sins in nature or 
under good government, forgiveness is a 
present and gracious human possibility. 
The forgiving spirit is known in human 
life. The Son of man hath power on earth 
to forgive sins. I behold in the midst of 
human history the Son of man saying with 
consciousness of a divine authority, '' Thy 
sins be forgiven thee." If man can for- 
give, of course God may. That Son of 
man in that most human act is iiot greater 
than the eternal God. " The Fatlier," he 



114 PERSONAL CREEDS. 

said, "is greater than I." We can well 
reason, therefore, from Christ's deeds up to 
the Father's works. God is the eternal and 
perfect Chris tlikeness. 

The human forgiveness of the Son of 
man represents, therefore, God's forgive- 
ness in heaven. Because God is greater 
than our hearts, because the Father is 
greater even than his Christ, therefore 
what the Son of man forgives on earth is 
forgiven in heaven. Forgiveness belongs 
to the moral nature of man and God. 

There is a doubtful Scripture which be- 
comes clearer if we read it in this human 
experience of the power of forgiveness. 
Jesus once said to his apostles, ''Receive 
ye the Holy Ghost : whosesoever sins ye 
forgive, they are forgiven unto them; 
whosesoever sins ye retain, they are re- 
tained." So the Lord gave to his disci- 
ples who had his Spirit something of his 
power of forgiving. The Roman Church, 
fastening upon the letter of the Scripture, 
claims the right of absolution. But the 
right belongs to the spiritual power ; the 
prerogative of exercising forgiveness is 



FORGIVENESS. 115 

given to the Christlike spirit. To receive 
the Holy Ghost was the condition of exer- 
cising Christ's power of forgiveness. And 
so far as Christian men receive the Holy 
Ghost, the influence of their lives shows 
something of that divine power of for- 
giveness and of judgment. The righteous, 
forgiving man in the community becomes 
a power of reconciliation or of sepai-ation ; 
men under his touch and influence are 
brought to forgiveness, or are discovered 
for judgment. The influence and effect 
of such a human life, full of the Holy 
Ghost, remains ; what it has done on earth 
in that Spirit is ratified in heaven, even as 
what the Lord did on this earth truly rep- 
resented the Father, and was done in his 
name. Something of this solemn possibil- 
ity and power resides in the most Christ- 
like lives. God in heaven owns their judg- 
ment, confirms their influence, lets their 
works abide. 

Thirdly. This forgiving spirit is itself 
many virtues in one. The man who can 
truly and effectually forgive, the man who 
can be a reconciling power in a commu- 



116 PERSONAL CREEDS. 

nity, is no weak man, or man of a single 
virtue, or mere instance of good nature. 
He must also be a just man, — a man who 
sees what is right as clear as the day, a 
man who wants always to get the right 
thing done ; a man who will not cover up 
evil, or hide iniquity, or say peace when 
there is no peace. It requires a high and 
even rare combination of virtues to be a 
peacemaker — not a peaceable soul, but a 
maker of peace ; and to exercise the spirit 
of forgiveness in any genuine and fruitful 
way is no child's play at life. Try it and 
see. It was no common man, not a right- 
eous Jew, nor a compliant Greek, nor a 
stern Roman, who could stand in that 
house, and say to that palsied man, " Thy 
sins be forgiven." It was the Son of man, 
the man of men, who spoke that human- 
divine word of forgiveness, the man who 
was so human, so thoroughly and fully 
human, that no one to this day can trace 
separate ancestral influences to his person, 
or say of any of his features, that is Hebrew, 
or Greek, or Roman. He, the sinless Man, 
who shows us what man may be at his 



FORGIVENESS. 117 

highest and his best — He in his perfect 
humanity forgave sins. Forgiveness in 
God can be, theretore, no lesser virtue. 
It is the prerogative of no single divine 
attribute ; the fulness of the Godhead is in 
it. The divine forgiveness, like our human 
forgiveness, like the Christ's, proceeds from 
the perfectness of the Divine Being, and 
all the Godhead goes forth in it. 

Fourthly. Human forgiveness is a costly 
thing. It costs something to have a for- 
giving spirit, and to exercise it. It is not 
so easy a thing for us to forgive men their 
trespasses. Forgiveness in a human heart 
always costs. And the following particu- 
lars of the cost of forgiveness may be 
learned in endeavors to reconcile broken 
human relations. First, forgiveness be- 
tween men requires just judgment, or the 
determination to see clearly the wrong and 
the right. And that costs moral effort. 
Secondly, forgiveness requires condemna- 
tion of the wrong done, even though it be 
like condemning one's own flesh. And 
to condemn another's wrong is often a 
painful thing for a man or woman to do, 



118 PERSONAL CEEEDS. 

yet it must be done for the sake of genu- 
ine forgiveness. Such condemnation of 
sin, therefore, must be costly also to the 
heart of the true God. Thirdly, the exer- 
cise of forgiveness requires likewise an 
effort, however costly, to make the person 
who has done wrong see that wrong, and 
confess it. It were easier often not to 
forgive, to let the man who has injured 
one go unforgiven, than to seek for him, 
to show him how his wrong hurts, how 
deeply it has been felt. And more than 
one proud father or mother has not been 
equal to this cost of forgiveness, but has 
shut the door of the home, forbidden the 
name of the lost child ever to be spoken, 
or left the prodigal as one dead, rather 
than take the humiliating pains, rather 
than be at the terrible cost of seeking the 
lost, following the child through all sin, 
being ready to show at any possible mo- 
ment of penitence how much it loves, how 
much the sin hurts it, how much is endured. 
Oh ! when we see in human life how much 
forgiveness and recoverj^ have cost, can we 
wonder at the cross of the Christ ? 



FOKGIVENESS. 119 

Nor is this all the cost of forgiveness. 
Still further, in genuine and lasting for- 
giveness nothing may be left concealed, no 
matter what the cost of the revelation may 
be. It must be known all around, by all 
who have the right to know, what has been 
done, what has been suffered, what the 
grief, what the penitence, what the wil- 
lingness to forgive, has been and is. This, 
likewise, I am saying, is truth of human 
forgiveness. Between those concerned in 
it there must be the costly willingness to 
let everything in the wrong done and suf- 
fered come to revelation. We say famil- 
iarly one to be forgiven by a friend must 
make a clean breast of it ; but that applies 
to the friend in his sense of wrong suffered, 
as well as to the person who asks pardon. 
I do not accept an apology with that genu- 
ineness which admits renewed and confi- 
dent friendship, if I pretend no offence 
was given. I do not forgive with a for- 
giveness which can forget, if I still hide 
in my secret thoughts any unspoken sense 
of the wrong done. Forgiveness requires 
a clean breast of it on both sides ; and if 



120 PERSONAL CREEDS. 

penitence on the one side is not met by 
perfect frankness on the other, there is no 
real reconciliation from which confidence 
can grow anew. This, I say, is a part of 
the doctrine of the cost of forgiveness 
which lies well within our earthly expe- 
rience ; and by it we may gain some better 
apprehension of Jesus' heavenly teaching 
of the sacrifice necessary for the divine 
forgiveness of the world. These several 
elements of the cost which we may know 
in forgiving one another's debts must enter 
in full and perfect truth into God's forgive- 
ness of us. He cannot forgive off-hand 
any more than we can. We should have 
no respect for the man who could forgive 
as easily as not. We would not trust the 
man who could smile at every injury, bow 
acquiescence at any insult, and offer his 
pardon even to the man who was slander- 
ing or robbing him. We should justly 
doubt as a spurious thing a human for- 
giveness which had been reached at no 
cost of suffering for the w^rong which had 
been inflicted. By this great price often 
of men's forgiveness of one another's sins, 



FOKGIYEXESS. 121 

we may gain some human knowledge of 
the divine necessity of the Cross. God's 
pain over this whole world's cruel sin is 
realized on the Cross. We can see in 
Christ's death how our sin has hurt God's 
heart. He lets us see this, that He may 
truthfully forgive us. He shows us through 
Christ's sufferings how hurtful our sin is, 
that He may honestly forget it. The Cross 
of Christ is the means and the pledge of 
the genuineness of God's forgiveness of 
the sin of the world. By such suffering, 
and after such revelation of suffering for 
sin, God can truthfully and with a perfect 
honesty, both forgive and forget all who 
will be reconciled to himself. So much of 
the divine secret of atoning love we may 
obtain some glimpse of through our expe- 
rience of human forgiveness and its cost 
to true hearts. 

We have been finding thus some near 
and real elements of the gospel of God's 
forgiveness of our sins through Christ, and 
at such cost of his sufferings, as we have 
been searching the truths Avhich lie within 
our human experience of forgiveness. I 



122 PERSONAL CREEDS. 

would not forget, indeed, that there are 
more heavenly aspects and relations of 
Christ's life and death which reach God- 
Avards beyond our definite conceptions of 
them; nor would I deny the reasonable 
use in their place and time of our more 
scholastic attempts to understand the di- 
vine method and means of our forgiveness. 
The profit, however, of many theological 
systems consists in the exercise of Chris- 
tian reason in building them, more than in 
their value after they are done. It is well 
for the mind of the church to be always 
theologizing, always seeking to systema- 
tize divine truths, provided it is humble 
and teachable enough of the Spirit to be 
ready to begin to make another and bet- 
ter system so soon as any one which it 
has been at work over, is done. But while 
theories of the atonement have their appro- 
priate place and use, the fact of the di- 
vine forgiveness, which we may approach 
through our human experience, is too great 
and glorious to be comprehended by any 
plan of our making. And upon any holy 
mount of Christian life, where the Son of 



FORGIVENESS. 123 

man becomes to faith the transfigured rev- 
elation of God, our little systems of divinity 
are as impertinent as were the tabernacles 
which Peter proposed to build, not know- 
ing what he said. Whenever any experi- 
ence of life and love opens to faith the in- 
dwelling glory of Divinity, it is truer and 
worthier for us to fall on our faces and 
worship. So the true heart of the Chris- 
tian church in its highest communion with 
the Christ, and in its holiest hours, has 
risen above its tabernacles of creed and 
system and worshipped the Divine Love 
which so loved the world. 

And to common men in their every-day 
life, the gospel of forgiving love may have 
access, if we will receive it simply and truly 
through our best and worthiest experience 
of life. It is still the Son of man who is 
to show us the Father. And the Son of 
man, if we will but follovv him on this 
earth, has ever his more heavenly things 
of God to suggest to us. 

In the possession and exercise of the for- 
giving spirit of the Son of man, as you 
realize the daily need of it, and discover 



124 PERSONAL CREEDS. 

the moral cost of it, you may gain some 
real, though simple and elemental knowl- 
edge of what your God Avould do for you, 
and of hoAv much you owe to his sacrifice 
of himself for you in his Christ. So an 
apostle would know Christ in the fellow- 
ship of his sufferings. And if in this short 
world we gain some elemental knowledge 
of divinity through vital sympathy with 
the Spirit of the Lord, then although the 
creeds which we take from earth to heaven 
be very short and very childlike, we shall 
be prepared in our own hearts after death 
for further revelations and increasing 
knowledge of the Holy and infinitely lov- 
able God, who so loved the world that he 
gave his only begotten Son. But if 
through Christlike sympathy of life we 
Avill not learn here on tliis earth these 
elements of his Divinity, in what other 
world can we expect to gain them ? 



VI. 



JESUS' ARGUMENT FOR IMMOR- 
TALITY. 



Xow he is not the God of the dead, but of the living : 
for all live unto him. — Luke xx. 38. 



VI. 

JESUS' ARGUMENT FOE IMMOR- 
TALITY. 

IN forming his personal creed, or work- 
ing-theory of life, no man who is not 
brutal will consent to put from him the 
thought of his individual immortality. 
For it must make a vast difference not 
only with the color of our happiness, but 
also with the substance of our conduct, if 
we are to plan and work only for some sev- 
enty years of life, or for ages and ages of 
existence. The spacious universe becomes 
to me an ever fresh and fascinating study, 
if I am to be permitted not only for a 
few wondering years, and at this earthly 
distance, to gaze at its glorious constella- 
tions, but if I am always to be somewhere 
an interested and active spectator amid 
its endless processes of life and light. 
Immortality haunts like a presence the 

127 



128 PEESONAL CREEDS. 

heart of man. The human reason stands 
questioning before this double mystery of 
our being, Am I made to live always, and 
what shall be my life in the hereafter? 
Are the dead raised, and with what body 
do they come ? 

In pursuance of the same human method 
of faith by which in previous sermons I 
have sought to gain some real apprehen- 
sion of other spiritual truths, we have now 
to approach reverently this belief in our 
future life. With reference to other doc- 
trines I have been saying that the heav- 
enly truths are to be grasped by their near, 
earthly ends ; and that if we do not gain 
some firm hold of them in their actual 
contacts with our present life, our relig- 
ion will lack reality, and our beliefs be 
but a procession of abstractions. This 
same simple and human method of ap- 
prehending divine truths will not fail us — 
I think it may prove particularly timely 
and helpful — in our effort to grasp the 
truth of our personal immortality. We 
may lay hold of the far unknown through 
that nearer part of it which becomes known 



IMMORTALITY. 129 

in our present life. We may apprehend 
our future life by the true, or eternal kind 
of life, of which the noble souls may begin 
now to have some experience. We know 
Avhat light is in the remotest star by the 
beam which enters our chamber. We may 
have in the truth of present experience 
some known and verifiable f oregleam of our 
immortality, although we cannot measure 
the full flood and splendor of the eternity 
around time in which we have our being. 
I shall have to speak, accordingly, in 
this manner, first, of the fact of life be- 
yond death, and then somewhat of the 
nature of that life in the world to come. 
Our text indicates Jesus' real and human 
method of teaching on this subject. It 
shows how the Master would have men 
grasp the hope of their future existence 
through the truth of their present knowl- 
edge of life. Jesus was speaking to cer- 
tain Sadducees who say that there is 
neither angel nor spirit. Those Saddu- 
cees, you remember, were men who had 
lost all moral enthusiasms from their lives. 
Their hearts failed to respond even to the 



130 PERSONAL CKEEDS. 

note of patriotism. They were the politi- 
cal aristocrats of Jerusalem, who were in- 
different to the wrongs of the people, and 
who had learned how to get the most out 
of this world on terms of easy compliance 
with the Romans. I need not describe 
them further ; for perhaps the two best- 
known classes of men in all countries and 
times are, on the one side, the hard, bigoted, 
religious Pharisees ; and, on the other 
hand, the cynical, comfortable, irreligious 
Sadducees. It is not surprising, it is alto- 
gether in accordance with the natural his- 
tory of faith, that men like those Saddu- 
cees, who had become incapable of moral 
enthusiasms, and among whom the old 
Hebrew sense of the high calling of their 
nation had burned dim, should not have 
had souls enough left in them to believe 
in the resurrection. Faith in personal im- 
mortality had shone forth in the heroic 
Maccabean age of their country ; faith in 
the future belongs to the sacrificial spirit; 
but those Sadducees were not men enough 
to believe in their own immortality. Now 
observe how Jesus met them. He stood 



IMMORTALITY. 131 

among them full of the consciousness of 
life — his soul the pure, burning focus of 
Hebrew prophecy — iiimself the life which 
is the light of men. And those sharp Sad- 
ducees, having secretly concocted, possibly 
in some club-house of theirs in the city, a 
very shrewd question, which might seem 
to throw the idea of man's future exist- 
ence into popular ridicule, ventured forth 

— their small, shrivelled selves hidden 
beneath the fine cloak of their philosophy 

— to question and to put to silence the 
Man of the full, noble, glowing conscious- 
ness of life. How did Jesus answer them ? 
By giving them a sign from heaven? But 
a man who cannot understand the sign of 
life in his own pulse-beatings has no soul 
to interpret a sign in heaven. God's pearls 
are not cast before the swine. Or Avill 
Jesus confute those Sadducees by causing 
Moses and Elias to appear ? On the holy 
mount before worshipping souls heaven 
may have more to show than earth has 
dreamed of; but the Lord will not use 
his martyrs and saints as apparitions to 
frighten the sceptics. Or, if Jesus saw 



132 PERSOXAL CREEDS. 

the uselessness of trying to convince by 
supernatural means men who had not 
made fair use of natural signs, he might 
have met their curious speculation con- 
cerning the state hereafter of the poor 
woman who had been so unfortunate as to 
have had seven husbands, by holding up 
to their minds some better imagination of 
the conditions of that other world life. 
But exactly how did Jesus meet them? 
He began by rejecting their speculation, 
and denying that the world to come must 
be like this world. That was reasonable. 
No planet, as we know, is like another. 
One star differeth from another star in 
glory. In the resurrection they are as the 
angels, not as they have been in this 
world. So far Jesus proceeded negatively 
Avith those Sadducees, clearing a little 
space in their thoughts for his positive 
affirmation of the future life which im- 
mediately follows. Now see how simple, 
and intensely human, and vitally real 
Jesus' argument of immortality was. The 
Lord made his appeal not to heaven above, 
nor to the depths beneath, but directly to 



IMMORTALITY. 133 

man's present consciousness of life. First 
he put his finger on a passage of their 
Scriptures : " But that the dead are raised, 
even Moses showed, in the place concern- 
ing the Bush." Yet it was more than a 
citation of a Biblical proof-text, when 
Jesus repeated that Scripture ; he would 
touch by it the chord of patriotism; he 
appealed to the Hebrew consciousness of 
life ; he would kindle into flame, were it 
still possible, the smouldering sparks of 
their national faith in their fathers' God ; 
and then instantly the Lord broadens his 
appeal to the universal, human sense of the 
worth of life, and he draws the natural 
inference from man's consciousness of life 
and hope in God : "- Now he is not the 
God of the dead, but of the living : for 
all live unto him." It would be an utterly 
base denial, then, both of man's present 
consciousness of life, and of the living- 
God himself, to imagine that the fathers 
can be dead, or that God is content to 
reign over a realm of the dead. Let us 
think for a few moments how simple, ele- 
mental, and sure of itself, is Jesus' argu- 



134 PEESOXAL CREEDS. 

ment for immortalitj^ from life and the 
Lord of life. 

We love life ; and it were a poor prepa- 
ration for death to seek to love li\dng less. 
We ought to love life more and more. 
We love life because we were made to 
live, and not to die. We love life because 
life is fulfilment, and death would be a 
contradiction of our whole being. We not 
only love life as a mere continuance of 
bodily existence, but as an increasing exer- 
cise of our powers, and enlarging oppor- 
tunity of our being. We love life not 
merely with that instinctive striving for 
self-preservation which we share with all 
that breathes, and even with some sensi- 
tive plants, but we love life with a growing 
sense of its moral worth and possibilities 
of the spirit; we love life with a love 
which is an insatiable longing and a holy 
prayer for more life, and larger, for full 
and perfect life ; we love life with a pro- 
phetic passion of being, and with a noble 
force of conscience thrown into our de- 
mand upon the universe to give us, in the 
body or out of the body, not death and 



IMMORTALITY. 135 

nothingness, but intenser, richer, higher 
life. We love life at first, it maj^ be, with 
the flickering desires of childhood, and 
later with the firm and vigilant purpose of 
manhood; and as the years pass, and the 
evening falls, we should still love life not 
less, but more richly, in the calm and ex- 
pectant hope of old age waiting on God. 
Love life we all do, and we should ; and 
most of all should we love life as we go 
down through death. For we were made 
to live. We were born for life. Life, not 
death, is the higher law of our nature. 

More than this holds good in our best 
experience of life. Not only does the ani- 
mal instinct of life become in man a moral 
love of it ; not only is life, and not death, 
the higher law of being to the heart and 
conscience of man ; but also the Avill of 
man is a growing assertion of life, and an 
absolute denial of death. We see this 
immortal will of life at its strongest and 
purest in Jesus. The Son of man was 
willing for our sakes to lay down his life, 
but he would not be holden by death. 
Jesus predicted his death and burial : but 



136 PERSONAL CBEEDS. 

he would not think for a moment that he 
could lie down in the grave and be nothing. 
He meant to live forever. He could not 
think of himself as dead, having no resur- 
rection and left abandoned of the living 
God forever, without part and portion in 
the world's coming Christian age and final 
redemption. There is a quiet, strong will 
and purpose of eternal life running through 
the whole earthly life and death of Jesus. 
And something of this will to live belongs 
by birthright and by baptism to all the 
Lord's brethren. It is the will of the 
Spirit. The best and truest souls have 
faced danger and death in the grand con- 
viction that they should live forever. There 
has been often a triumphal will of the eter- 
nal life in human martyrdoms. And there 
is a power in this will of man to live which 
nature has to reckon with as with any 
other force. I do not consent to be noth- 
ing. If I can help it by gathering up all 
my energies of spirit in one focus of life, 
I will not suffer the universe to quench 
me. I refuse at the living centre of my 
will to the dissolution of myself. You may 



IMMORTALITY. 137 

kill Socrates, if you can catch Socrates. 
Let nature overtake this body ; it has still 
to overcome me. I will not submit my 
soul to be held in corruption. In propor- 
tion as one loves life, and begins to realize 
in what the true life worthy of a man's love 
consists, in that measure this will to live 
through death becomes clear and strong. 
Death will have to meet and overcome not 
merely these unstable combinations of mol- 
ecules in this bod)^, but also this more vital 
and steadfast power — the will of the spirit 
which is in a man to live and not to die. 
This will of life must be broken forever 
before a living soul can be held in death. 

Nor is this will to live a human presump- 
tion, or will of pride. It is a will born of 
penitence and humility; yet a will noui- 
ished, strengthened, and made firm by ev- 
ery nobler desire and true effort of a man's 
life. The will to live, the determination to 
go down through physical death in the 
personal will to live on, and to find or to 
make for one's self further conditions of 
mental and moral existence, is the will of 
the spirit in a man who is determined to 



138 PERSONAL CREEDS. 

keep the trust of being his God has given 
him, and not to suffer himself to be parted 
from his own soul ; — a will of the spirit of 
a man to use to the utmost his powers of 
being, that he may not be overcome by na- 
ture, but may win his true and final place 
before his God. The will of life into 
which all love pours its passion, and all 
thought concentrates its energies, the will 
of life which must find eternal truth, and 
worship the living God, exists as a death- 
less force at the heart of every pure, noble, 
heroic life, and the true souls know it. 
This living will to live, nourished, grown 
strong, become a noble aspiration, amid 
the changes of this mortality, is itself a 
force — one of the great forces and perma- 
nent powers of known being ; — surely as 
real a power, and more vital and organizing 
than any of the forces of chemistry which 
may dissolve this body. It is a Godlike 
will to live which has already shown itself 
in this body to be superior to many of na- 
ture's lesser forces of disease and pain, and 
which sometimes seems to rise up, like one 
that triumphs, in the very hour and agony 



IMMOKTALITY. 139 

of death. It is a Christlike will of eternal 
life which the forces that wrest from it 
this mortality do not overtake, and cannot 
overcome. There is something unconquer- 
able by nature in the spiritual will of life. 
The Lord Christ in his death revealed it in 
its full power of triumph over death. His 
will of future life grew directly from his 
consciousness of the living God who had 
sent him into this world. His spiritual con- 
fidence of life is a clear note through his 
last words to his disciples and before his ene- 
mies : '' I come again. I go unto the Father. 
I go unto him that sent me. Thou wouldest 
have no power against me, except it were 
given thee from above. I am a king." 
When did our Lord ever seem so living — 
a spirit so full of the power and the cer- 
tainty of immortal life, as in those last hours 
when he went to his death ? '' Whom God 
raised up, having loosed the pangs of 
death : because it was not possible that he 
should be holden of it." He who had said, 
God is the God of the living — He who was 
the Life, living in its own perfect light — 
He who trusted his soul in death to God's 



140 PERSONAL CREEDS. 

first and liigliest law of life, could not be 
holden in corruption. " Moreover my flesh 
also shall dwell in hope : because thou wilt 
not leave my soul in Hades, neither wilt 
thou give thy Holy One to see corruption." 
In proportion as anj^ man rises to a Christ- 
like consciousness of life, and into the 
Christlike will to live, shall those Messianic 
words become also to him as the psalm of 
life. And thus it is the duty and the right 
of every man of us so to live daily, in such 
spiritual will and purpose so supreme, that 
we can go down to the grave courageously, 
not as into a great darkness with the 
flickering hope that may still glimmer in 
the ashes of natural affection, and as a lin- 
gering spark of aspiration ; but in the glow- 
ing consciousness of love and high sense 
of life made for ideal ends of being, and 
with quenchless will to live and to know 
hereafter — a spiritual will for the eternal 
life which is itself a God-given and God- 
sustained will of life in death — the Chris- 
tian will of eternal life and love in which, 
from the moment a soul is born anew into 
it, dwells the power of the Holy Ghost. 



IMMORTALITY. 141 

So many souls seem to have gone hence 
in full spiritual power. "I am indeed 
hovering between consciousness and un- 
consciousness," said Schleiermacher shortly 
before his death, " but within myself I am 
living through divinest moments. I must 
think the deepest speculative thoughts." 
We speak of death too lightly, as though 
dying could be only an experience of suf- 
fering, and not an action also of the spirit 
in meeting the new experience of life. 
To die may be not merely passive submis- 
sion to nature's last necessity, but also an 
active participation of spirit in the great 
change, and an eager approach to the life 
opening beyond our sight. In the help- 
lessness and the disenthralment of death 
the Scripture may find further fulfilment : 
" Willing rather to be absent from the bodj-, 
and to be at home with the Lord." And, 
'' The spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh 
is weak." 

There is still another human and pow- 
erful truth in Jesus' answer to those scoff- 
ing Sadducees. Jesus, as we have been 
observing, had dared in many simple and 



142 PERSONAL CREEDS. 

sincere ways to find God himself through 
human hearts and in the consciences of men. 
The Son of man shows the Father. The 
Son of man has power to forgive sins. 
Human forgiveness contains within the 
heart of it some secret of the divine for- 
giveness of sins. God's good intention 
is known through nature, and still more 
intimately in human nature. The same 
human apprehension of the divine purpose 
enables us to lay firmer hold of this high 
truth of our immortality. For Jesus 
teaches us that we may discover God's 
further intention for our future by our 
necessary idea of Him who is the God of 
the living. God has a plan for the contin- 
uation of our life in the world beyond the 
grave, because we cannot conceive Him to 
be the God of the dead in a realm of the 
dead. " God," said our Lord, and as 
though no more needed to be said, " is 
not the God of the dead, but of the liv- 
ing." What would a God be who could 
remain content to be the God of the dead ? 
You men would not be satisfied to be lords 
of a dead world. It were no sovereignty 



IMMOKTALITY. 143 

to reign over a cemetery. Shall your God 
be less than you would be? Can He be 
Lord of a dead and silent life? Not so, 
not so ; the thought would be unworthy 
you ; it were then a base denial of Him. 
You men may feel your hearts glowing with 
the sense of life; you may live with ad- 
vancing power of life ; you live at your 
highest and your best not unto the earth 
which may wax old, nor the heavens which 
perish, but unto God who is from eternity 
to eternity : so you live, and your fathers 
live ; and God shall not be king of a dead 
universe. It is absurd to think, it is a 
moral libel to imagine, that the living God 
who has made you for life, and who has 
given you more power to live than you can 
find space or time for in any of your days or 
occupations here, would be content to let 
you fall back from his own Almighty hand 
into nothingness, — his image in you lost 
forever, — while he remained the defeated 
Lord of life reigning over a deserted realm 
of death. Impossible ! The God of Abra- 
ham, Isaac, and Jacob is not the mournful 
and solitary Guardian of the tombs of the 



144 PERSONAL CREEDS. 

prophets ; He is not the single living 
Presence walking alone in the garden 
which once was vocal, but which is now 
forever silent; He cannot be the Supreme 
Ruler of a world which death has wrested 
from his love, lost and buried in eternal 
darkness ; — He is the God of the living ; 
Life, not death, is highest law ; Life, not 
death, is final Lord; in His presence is 
life ; the fathers live before Him ; all live 
unto Him ; He is God of the living. 

You see, then, the directness and sym- 
plicity of Jesus' appeal to the truth of im- 
mortal existence which lies within our 
present consciousness, and which gains 
power with our firmer experience of the 
worth of life. In still other portions of 
our present experience may be found invo- 
lutions and implications of immortality. 
The ''Intimations of Immortality," of 
which nature's great poet in our century 
has sung, could be discerned by Words- 
worth's " vital soul," because they are the 
real involutions within present life of future 
evolutions of man's being. The poet sim- 
ply listens to life's spiritual memory and 



IMMORTALITY. 145 

diviner prophecy of itself. It is not, there- 
fore, altogether true to real life now to 
say, as we so often liear it said hj worldlj^ 
men, that we know nothing about the 
future life, and have nothing here to do 
with it. For the present is potentially the 
future. The world beyond is at many 
points of human experience a felt pressure 
upon this world. We know the future for 
better or for worse by the tendencies of 
conduct now towards further good or evil. 
What gravitation is among the constella- 
tions, we know by gravity upon this earth. 
We have some prescience of our future 
life after death very much as tlie child has 
foreknowledge of possible manhood or 
womanhood in its child-consciousness of 
being. Immortality, in one word, is the pres- 
ent spiritual implication of our life. The 
future life is naturally involved in present 
life. And along several lines of conscious- 
ness, and in much variety of experience, 
this present involution of immortality in 
our mortality is to be recognized. 

Without following this truth farther 
now in any of these inviting directions, 



146 PERSONAL CREEDS. 

let me rather put the method of the argu- 
ment for it in a single analogj^ Suppose 
one tracks a single sunbeam across the sky 
from east to west. There is the measure — 
the length of our atmosphere — of a beam 
of light. Suppose that you could look no 
further, and that all your knowledge of 
that ray of light were confined to your 
vision of it within the few miles of its 
visibility in our air. Very well, what then 
might you know of that ray of light? 
Remember you are supposed to have no 
perception that it is a sunbeam, but only 
knowledge of the visible ray within this 
atmosphere. Yet you would know from 
the light itself that there was more of it 
than your measure of it exhausted. You 
would find that it was some greater force 
than appears in its brief transit across our 
sky. You would discover that it did not 
proceed from below, nor return to the earth, 
although you could not tell from whence 
it came, or whither it went. You would 
analyze its nature, and common earthli- 
ness would not explain its being. You 
would be puzzled by it ; it would be a 



IMMORTALITY. 147 

mystery of light, something in the atmos- 
phere, yet not wholly of it, — natural, that 
is, belonging to the air, yet supernatural, 
— something not entirely to be explained 
by the atmosphere through which it shone. 
In short, the light itself in its passage 
through the sky would be evidence and 
revelation of something from beyond and 
from above. That ray by its own celestial 
nature betrays some further secret of sun 
or star. It would be unscientific to isolate 
it, and to say it is only a phenomenon of 
our air. And I see not why the same be 
not true of spirit, and of our spiritual ex- 
perience of life. By that part of it which 
is known, I believe in that part of it which 
is unknown. By this earthly measure of 
our life, I believe in its celestial origin and 
its heavenly destiny. By my experience of 
life, in one word, I deny death. By the 
known nature of our life and love, within 
this earthly arc of it, I affirm its unknown 
continuity and completion. 

Thus far I have been seeking to follow 
Jesus' method of teaching concerning the 
future life in his direct appeal to the evi- 



148 PERSONAL CREEDS. 

dences of it in our human experience of 
life, and I have not touched the historical 
proof of the Lord's resurrection. Possi- 
bly we may need to learn better the sim- 
ple human truth of what true, generous 
life is, and how it contains in itself the 
implication of immortality, before the wit- 
ness to the resurrection of the Lord can 
lay hold mightily of our faith. Possibly 
before the miracle of the resurrection can 
show us its convincing power, we may need 
first to be taught, perhaps from deep ex- 
perience of sorrow, how utterly unnatural 
death is ; how truly and perfectly natural 
life, the eternal life, must be. If we will 
but go and learn that earthly part of 
the heavenly doctrine of the resurrection, 
which Jesus would have taught those Sad- 
ducees Avhen he gave them to understand 
that we live unto God, and that God's 
world cannot be a realm of death and a 
deserted world of graves ; then we may be 
prepared through such lesson of life to go 
also with the disciples to the empty tomb, 
and to receive as a thing not incredible 
their witness that the God of the living 



IMMO RT ALIT Y. 149 

did not suffer his Holy One to be holden 
by corruption. 

It will be next in order to pass from some 
faith in future existence to that other 
inquiry which the sense of immortality 
presses upon our reason, In what ways can 
our life be continued, and what must be 
its future rewards or punishments? In 
contemplating these high themes we shall 
need with much caution of speech and 
humbleness of mind to seek for the pres- 
ent practical, verifiable portions of Jesus' 
doctrine of the eternal life. For this day 
let this part of the truth of our immortal 
destiny suffice ; let our thoughts kindle and 
our hearts glow with it ; — -I am born for 
life, and not for death ; I am not made to 
lie down forever in a dead universe, but to 
arise and to meet the living God. Noble, 
unselfish, sacrificial life is its own hope, 
and love its own security. For the God 
of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, is the God 
of the living ; for we all, — our fathers 
and ourselves, — they who are beyond 
death, and we who have yet to pass 
through it, — live unto him. 



VII. 

PRACTICAL VIEWS OF FUTURE 
RETRIBUTION. 



And in Hades he lifted up his eyes^ being in tor- 
ments^ and seeth Abraham afar off, and Lazarus in 
his bosom. And he cried and said, Father Abraham, 
have mercy on me, and send Lazarus, that he may dip 
the tip of his finger in water, and cool my tongue ; for 
I am in anguish in this flame. — Luke xvi. 23, 24. 



VII. 

PEACTICAL VIEWS OF FUTURE 
RETRIBUTION. 

1HAVE taken a fearful text because 
we need to learn how to take the fear- 
ful Scriptures mto our working-theories of 
life. That would be an unmanl}^ personal 
creed which should shrink from approach- 
ing the awful facts of life and destinj^ 
The faith of the Church in eternal punish- 
ment becomes but so much religious som- 
nambulism, if it wanders with unconscious 
eye out into the darkness and terror of the 
divine judgments. No honest believer will 
be content to be a religious somnambulist 
among the eternal realities. It were better 
to keep still within the light of one's little 
chamber, waiting for God's dawn. 

Only that part of our faith in future 
rewards and punishments is real which can 
be brought home to the human conscience 

158 



154 PERSONAL CEEEDS. 

and heart. In pursuance, accordingly, of 
the same method which has seemed to me 
helpful in our approach to other doctrines, 

— the endeavor to seize upon the heavenly 
truths by the nearer, earthly ends of them, 

— a principle of faith Avhich I think is sim- 
ply and profoundly true to the method of 
Jesus' conversations with men, — we are 
next to seek for some apprehension of the 
nature of the future life and its retribu- 
tions. I attempt not the task, impossible 
to me, of harmonizing and presenting all 
the Biblical representations in one finished 
dogmatic picture of the world to come : I 
would venture rather on the humbler yet 
more useful endeavor of seeking to regain 
for the salvation of men from their sins, 
some real, appreciable, and practically effi- 
cient faith in heaven and hell. For if the 
Church of God is to succeed in our genera- 
tion in restoring its doctrine of the future 
life among the working-powers of righteous- 
ness in this world, it must needs first pass 
through much theological repentance. In 
former times the church has both wrought 
and suffered incalculable harm by giving 



PRACTICAL RETRIBUTION. 155 

over its prophetic Scriptures concerning 
the hereafter to the methods of the scribes, 
and by forsaking the simple, human way 
of all Jesus' teaching concerning divine 
and eternal things. It would have been 
sad enough, had the consequence of this 
mistaken boldness of the church before 
the judgments of the Eternal been only 
the crushing here and there of some tender 
human heart under a weight of men's over- 
beliefs too heavy to be borne ; but the worst 
of it is that the vain and sometimes violent 
attempt of faith to force upon the reason 
and conscience beliefs concerning the future 
world which men could not make real and 
right to them by their own heart-beatings, 
has succeeded but too well in deadening 
the souls of men to all preaching concern- 
ing the possible future retributions of sin, 
and even to this day imperils in the most 
orthodox pulpits the motive-power itself 
which at some points of direct moral con- 
tact ought to be brought to bear from the 
future upon the present life. 

The history of faith in the future life 
has been not only, on the one hand, a 



156 PERSONAL CEEEDS. 

history of spiritual power in this worid, — • 
a history of revivals and missionary zeal, — 
but also, on the other hand, it has been a 
history of great loss to Christianity, — a 
history of doubt, suffering, despair, and 
often of intense reactions of human hearts. 
With regard to no article, therefore, of our 
creeds should the individual thinker be 
more cautious and reserved, and the church 
more teachable and tolerant. At no point 
in our Christian confession is controversj^ 
more unseemly. This high, half-revealed 
truth of the eternal life it is sacrilegious to 
lower into a standard of ecclesiastical war- 
fare. It is almost blasphemous for mortal 
hands to seize this awful doctrine and use 
it as a club with which to beat their fellow- 
servants. A missionar}^ Board divided 
against itself over this point, of all others, 
of uncertain doctrine, presents a spectacle 
of human folly at which the devils of mis- 
chief might chuckle, and over which angels 
of pity might weep. There are places 
enough in the life of this sinful and 
adulterous generation where the trumpet 
of the apostle of God's righteousness should 



PRACTICAL RETRIBUTION. 157 

give no uncertain sound ; but the trumpeter 
of our Israel is not to be tolerated where 
we walk with uncovered heads in the land 
of the dead. There Jesus wept. " I had 
rather," said an apostle, "speak five words 
with my understanding, that I might in- 
struct others also, than ten thousand ^ords 
in a tongue." No more useful rule of 
faith could be found for our present belief 
and preaching on the subject of eternal life 
and death. The church has spoken ten 
thousand Avords concerning the future 
world and the final issues of God's judg- 
ments, which no men have understood, and 
Avliich no man can make real to his rea- 
son and heart ; it will be more efficacious 
for righteousness' sake if we can learn to 
speak but five words of justice and mercj^ 
in the vernacular of the present moral 
experience of men. 

There are points of positiveness in Jesus' 
teaching concerning the hereafter; and 
there are also places where his words fall 
away from us into indefiniteness. We 
should study to be positive in our faiths 
where his great verilies rise right before 



158 PERSONAL CREEDS. 

US, sure as the eternal hills ; and also we 
should learn in our churches and in our 
pulpits to keep still, and to be content at 
present to gaze silently into the dreamy 
distance, where the Lord's revelations fail, 
and in the unmeasured depths the unknown 
stars are waiting. 

This lesson both of Christlike positive- 
ness and of Christlike silence we must be 
willing to learn in our creeds and also in 
our preaching, if we are not to lose from 
the life of men the whole motive-power of 
the world to come. For we shall surely 
fail to hold men to the eternal truths 
which they ought now to feel and to obey, 
if we recklessly insist that they shall grasp 
parts of our doctrines of them which may 
perhaps be mapped out in our creeds, but 
which no moral experience of ours can 
reach and realize. 

The true emphasis of faith lies on the 
present, definite substantives, life and 
death, which Jesus contrasted, and of 
which already we have some experience 
in the moral processes of this world; to 
put the whole stress on the indefinite ad- 



PRACTICAL RETRIBUTION. 159 

jective eternal^ which takes its color from 
the nouns it intensifies, and which of itself 
is incomprehensible, is to endanger the 
substantive part of the faith in moral retri- 
butions, which may now to some extent 
be verified in the opposite histories of sin 
and virtue. Let us seek to take hold of 
Jesus' doctrine of eternal life and death 
where it takes hold of us, not where we 
cannot really touch it with our human 
hearts. This is to do what Jesus always 
intended to have men do with his teaching. 
For he constantly sought to put his words 
into real, immediate contacts with the 
living men and women to whom he was 
speaking. And his few words concerning 
the future life were words spoken by him 
when in actual touch with the consciences 
and hearts of men. What light there is 
in the gospels on the world to come, was 
light struck out by some particular and 
practical contacts of Jesus with men and 
their sins. 

I think we shall understand better this 
simple, human method and aim of Jesus in 
all his teaching concerning future rewards 



160 PERSONAL CREEDS. 

and punishments, and so we shall gain a 
soberer and juster conception of his doc- 
trine, if we take particular notice of the 
circumstaDces and conditions which led 
the Lord to say anything whatsoever con- 
cerning the world to come. You will 
observe that when Christ uttered a Avord 
about future punishments he usually had 
been talking with men who had stood in 
their sins before him, and been hard and 
impenitent; and when he had a hint to 
give about future rcAvards, it was usually 
when he was talking with some discour- 
aged or too impatient disciples. The 
Lord's doctrine concerning the future life 
Avas shaped to fit special manifestations 
and particular needs of human nature. It 
was never abstract teaching. 

His revelation of futurity was not a fin- 
ished picture set in a closed frame. His 
words were not dogmatic words fitted to 
a system. Jesus never lectured. The 
Lord never Habbinized, He met men and 
women, and looked into their hearts, and 
from his large, loving wisdom he gave 
them the truth they needed then and there 



PRACTICAL RETEIBUTION. 161 

for their lives. Hence the frequent para- 
doxes of the gospels, as real life abounds 
in moral paradoxes. There were exigen- 
cies in Jesus' life when he taught his dis- 
ciples somewhat as a commander on a 
battle-field might instruct his staff, not in 
theories of military science, not in words 
made carefully responsible for all possible 
future constructions of them, but in de- 
tached sayings, and by expressions to be 
understood in the light of immediate 
duties : there are verses in these gospels 
which are compact as military orders, and 
it was intended that they should be under- 
stood by the emergency which called them 
forth. Oh ! how the church has mis- 
understood Christ by calling him Rabbi, 
when he would walk with his disciples 
through the ages in the simplicity of his 
life and teaching as Master and Lord ! Go 
back to the New Testament, and read 
again and again the words of Jesus in 
the light of the ministry of his life, and 
surely you must discover that the Lord 
had an immediate practical purpose, a 
human aim, in every word which he spoke. 



162 PERSONAL CREEDS. 

We cannot knoAv his doctrine, if we miss 
his aim. 

From the many sayings of Jesus which 
illustrate this practical method of his 
teaching concerning the hereafter, and 
which show also our true way of approach 
towards this doctrine, I have taken pur- 
posely that parable which has so often 
been abused for ultra-dogmatic ends, but 
which is still a tremendous Scripture in its 
simple and direct application to real life. 
If we try now both to avoid the abuse of 
it, and also to use it as a parable for mod- 
ern life, as the Lord himself first used it 
in his day, I think we may succeed in 
getting more of Jesus' lesson from the 
world to come into our personal creeds. 

I need spend, however, but a moment in 
indicating the possible theological abuses 
of such fearful Scriptures. If we take the 
parable as a definite body of teaching con- 
cerning the final issues of this life ; if we 
seek to run all its suggestive lines out into 
an exact and complete survey of the here- 
after ; we shall soon find that its verses cross 
one another, and its lines become confused. 



PRACTICAL KETRIBUTION. 163 

Reading the parable literally, as we might 
a lecture to students on eschatology, we 
find a rich man w^ho had died and been 
buried and was in Hades, having eves, and 
power of speech, and feeling thirst, — all 
these bodily functions, — yet this all before 
the resurrection at the last day; and we 
see a poor man also who apparently with- 
out burial had been taken bodily to an- 
other part of the same domain of the dead. 
Looking at the parable in this misleading 
way of dogmatic definition, we see a great 
gulf and distance across which none can 
go to help or to hurt, but over which it is 
perfectly easy in ordinary tones to carry 
on conversation. 

Interpreting the parable further in this 
foolish Rabbinical way, we have to explain 
these perplexities that a beggar, of whose 
moral character we know nothing, reclines 
in Abraham's bosom, and a rich man, who 
has not lost all touch of human feeling, is 
in torment ; that pitilessness, which was 
Dives' inhumanity ' on earth, in Paradise 
becomes Lazarus' happy unconcern for suf- 
fering ; and yet Abraham on the one side, 



164 PERSONAL CREEDS. 

Avith patriarchal grace, still calls the man in 
the flame his son. Choosing with thought- 
less haste to understand the whole para- 
ble as a representation of the final states 
of different souls, we are left with this 
picture of doom : a tenement writhing 
with sin and suffering within sight and 
sound, in the same world, of a dwelling 
full of happiness and ease, and that, too, 
not as the spectacle which we now must 
notice of contrasted wealth and suffering 
in the same cities, at the tAvo ends of Lon- 
don, or in opposite regions of affluence and 
squalor separated by one avenue in New 
York, and which Ave can endure only be- 
cause our hearts are hard, or Ave trust such 
contradictions in human fortunes cannot 
last forever ; but — if we will insist in 
interpreting the parable in this dogmatic 
Avay — we must see this aAvful dualism be- 
tween happiness and misery eternalized ; 
this spectacle left as an ahvays apparent 
and protruding dualism; — two places in 
the same land of the "utmost contrast of 
ease and Avretchedness always Avithin sight 
and sound, but never Avithin pity's reach of 



PRACTICAL BETRIBUTION. 165 

each other ; — and this dualism of Lazarus 
and Dives, the one in Abraham's bosom, 
the other in torment, and each within call 
but not help of the other, regarded as the 
final outcome of God's eternal purpose of 
creation in Christ Jesus, and the end of 
the whole history of the Cross. So, if we 
please, we may understand a parable of 
Jesus Christ. So of old the scribes could 
interpret their prophets. But it is safe to 
say without argument that so the Christ 
could not have meant to teach his disci- 
ples. We may rest morally certain, that 
when we draw out the parable into the 
difficulties and moral inconceivabilities of 
this literalness, we have greatly mistaken 
the practical method of the conversations 
of Jesus with men. I put away from us, 
therefore, as unworthy, confusing, and con- 
trary to the spiritual personality of Christ, 
all Rabbinical attempts to deduce from 
Jesus' momentary revelations and practical 
teachings such definite dogmas concern- 
ing the eternal judgments of the Father 
and the end of this world-age. Jesus 



166 PERSONAL CKEEDS. 

spake not as the scribes. Our Lord never 
Rabbinized. 

Now, then, very humbly, very reverentty, 
let us seek to understand what the Son of 
man would make us men feel and do by 
this tremendous parable from the world- 
age just beyond this. For this purpose, we 
must first put his word of teaching back 
into its living human connections. This 
time the Pharisees have been talking with 
the Christ. And upon one thoroughly 
bad trait in those men Jesus had fixed 
his eye. "And the Pharisees," we read, 
"who were lovers of money, heard all 
these things." Those Pharisees are char- 
acterized by their love of mone}^. That 
love had become their consuming passion. 
In them the love of money, which, like 
other natural desires, has its legitimate 
uses, had passed the bounds of nature, and 
become the lust of money, which, like any 
other lust, may eat a man out of all heart 
and soul. And those lovers of money 
scoffed at the Christ. If ever in the love 
of man and the fear of God a human being 
has been called to speak the plainest truth 



t^KACTICAL RETRIBUTION. 167 

at his command, Jesus was called to speak 
some fearful word to those hard men. And 
he did not hesitate to do it. You and I 
might not have dared speak it ; but Jesus 
Christ never was afraid. He did his Avhole 
duty to those lusters after money. We are 
not surprised that they wanted to crucify 
him, when we discover how severely he 
revealed those men to themselves. There 
is nothing so remarkable in all dramatic 
literature in which souls are laid bare, as 
were Jesus' disclosures of the master-pas- 
sions of men. And what a gospel it would 
be to mammon in our day if human lips 
could sometimes be inspired to speak as 
Jesus could speak to such men ! 

So from contact with real life this para- 
ble comes to pass. It is like a moment's 
flash of light from the pure justice above 
directly down upon those lovers of money. 

The last thing we may be sure that 
Jesus was thinking about when those men 
were before him, was how God's way in 
eternity should be justified. He was think- 
ing of what those Pharisees deserved. He 
saw in the near future the inevitable flame 



168 PERSONAL CREEDS. 

towards which such mhumanity was rush- 
ing. He wanted to make those men see 
in time to what inevitable pains and penal- 
ties their wicked selfishness was coming. 
The Lord was not cutting with cold artistic 
touch a representation in cameo of the last 
day, and the end of the world, for philo- 
sophic Christian faith nineteen centuries 
afterwards to take in hand and scrutinize. 
He was thinking of those wretched Phari- 
sees who were lovers of money; and he 
would have been glad could he have made 
their souls turn pale at some revelation of 
inevitable justice. And for that purpose, 
and while he held those men under the 
consuming eye of his divine conscience, — 
this is what the Christ, the tender, the sym- 
pathizing, the strong, just, kingly Christ, 
did ; and if there enters into the Christian 
church any man whose soul the lust of 
money, consuming as anj^ other lust, has 
well-nigh burned out, this parable is here 
to-day in the Lord's Gospel for him, and 
may his soul shudder at it I This is what 
Jesus did for those Pharisees, and what 
more could his love have done for them ? 



PRACTICAL RETRIBUTION. 169 

He painted a fearful picture fresh from 
their life. He took the vivid colors of it 
from their habits. He used the words 
which they could understand. Very dim 
and faded words they may seem now for 
our imaginations of the conditions of spir- 
itual existence, — Hades, paradise, Abra- 
ham's bosom, the flame of Gehenna ; — they 
are to us ancient words of the Jewish 
Rabbis. I have read pages of learned dis- 
cussions over their meanings; but they 
were nursery words to those Pharisees. 
They were colors for future retribution to 
which their eyes had been used from child- 
hood. The Lord knew to whom he was 
speaking, and what they might be made to 
understand, when he drew this parable from 
their vernacular. Nor did he hesitate at a 
single word. By one rapid stroke he trans- 
ferred in a moment the present into the 
hereafter. He depicted with a bold touch 
the great reversal of human conditions — 
the beggar in Abraham's bosom, Dives in 
torment where the pitiless man richly de- 
served to feel what all his life long he had 
been quite willing that other men should 



170 PEESONAL CREEDS* 

suffer. Gehenna was a known valley of 
consuming Are in those days. Jesus could 
be a fearful realist in his imagery for 
an immediate moral purpose. - Were he 
preaching to similar men now, I doubt if 
he would go back to Judea for his parable 
of the inevitable future torment of present 
sin ; I think more likel}^ he would not 
hesitate to go down into the darkness 
of men's mines, or to stand before the 
furnaces of fire in their factories, to find 
words by which, if possible, he would 
make them realize what penalties wait for 
inhumanity, toward what torments sins 
descend, and how impossible it is in a 
universe made for goodness that wicked- 
ness and happiness can long live in a 
palace together. 

Speaking in this great motive to those 
Jews who were lovers of money, Jesus 
continued thus : " And the rich man also 
died, and was buried. And in Hades he 
lifted up his eyes, being in torments, and 
seeth Abraham afar off, and Lazarus in his 
bosom." Jesus paints the picture, and 
without a word of comment leaves it to 



PRACTICAL RETEIBUTION. 171 

make its own fearful appeal to those lovers 
of money. The Lord Christ will do all that 
his words can do for those hard men by 
drawing the severe lines of his parable as 
true to life here and hereafter in its moral 
inevitableness as Avords can depict it. 
'' And he cried and said, Father Abraham, 
have mercy on me ! " — so the Christ keeps 
straight on trying to make those miserable 
lovers of money see what they surely are 
coming to, if they do not repent, and will 
not be less inhuman ; — '' And send Laza- 
rus, that he may dip the tip of his finger 
in water, and cool my tongue ; for I am 
in anguish in this flame." Ay ! Send Laza- 
rus ! There was a man down in that coal 
mine, and even the crumbs failed him, and 
he died. There was a man faring sump- 
tuously every day, and he died, — and his 
burial was worth mentioning. I can see 
still the long procession, going through 
the streets, and a brass band at the head. 
And just beyond death, where the clamor 
of our pride cannot go, lies another world. 
'' But now here he is comforted, and thou 
art in anguish." Send Lazarus to Dives ! 



172 PERSONAL CREEDS. 

I think had I been a disciple listening to 
Jesus when he spoke that parable to those 
Pharisees who were lovers of money, I 
could have clapped my hands in exulta- 
tion, and have fallen at the feet of the Son 
of man, and blessed him for such grand 
moral outspokenness to those cruel men. 
I wonder Peter did not break in with some 
expression of his impetuous delight at such 
brave justice. But uninterrupted by friend 
or foe, Jesus keeps on his grand, awful 
preaching of social righteousness and com- 
ing retribution. By one further graphic 
touch — that single line of the fixed gulf 
— he shows how impossible it is that any 
other consequences in the next world 
should follow wrong conduct here. One 
might imagine that the words of our Lord 
would have made those men turn pale to 
their inmost souls at such description of 
their cruel meanness and its prospect of 
future torments, — Lazarus the beggar 
there in comfort, and themselves in the 
flame, and not a drop of water for Abra- 
ham to reach to them across a great, fixed 
gulf. 



PRACTICAL RETRIBUTION. 173 

But here the parable, thus far so simple, 
so direct, so fearfully true to human life 
and its inevitable moral consequences, 
takes a turn which is surprising. Jesus 
might have continued by urging those 
men in view of the moral certainties and 
torments of retribution to repent. But he 
stops. He gives the parable a different 
application. Perhaps while he was speak- 
ing he discerned that his preaching had 
failed. Such men will not be persuaded 
to humanity by fear. Moses and the 
prophets had tau^ght them justice and 
social righteousness. They knew already 
well enough that it was contrary to God's 
eternal law to let Lazarus die at the door. 
Jesus leaves his parable to work what 
effect it may upon them ; — was it for the 
disciples' sake, and as a suggestion for 
their future preaching of the Cross, that he 
puts into Abraham's mouth a few words 
to show that men will not be persuaded by 
fear, even though one should rise from the 
dead to preach to them of Dives' torments? 
The Lord's lesson lies here at the close of 
his awful parable for us to read it : If we 



174 PERSONAL CREEDS. 

will not obey our law and prophets ; if we 
will not heed conscience ; if we are los- 
ing our heart for mercy, no message from 
the dead can save us ; we are doing all we 
now can to make our future hopeless. We 
can well believe that men so far gone 
in comfortable selfishness as Dives, men 
like those Pharisees who devour widows' 
houses, and are willing to fare sumptu- 
ously every day, although the people be 
damned, can hardly be saved by any words, 
though one from the dead should preach 
to them ; the only conceivable moral res- 
toration of such men even to their lost 
sense of pity and the first instincts of 
mercy, might be by giving them a touch 
of such experience of flame as Dives was 
passing through. 

With this revelation of the inevitable 
future torment of hardened selfishness the 
parable stops. It was meant for practical 
righteousness' sake, not for speculative 
uses. Other words of the Master concern- 
ing the world to come suggest much that 
we should like to know more definitely ; 
but they belong also to a thoroughh^ prac- 



PKACTICAL RETKIBUTIOX. liO 

tical revelation for present moral purposes. 
Jesus' words concerning the rewards and 
punishments of the future life are clear, 
distinct, powerful, just at those points 
where we need to feel eternal pressures 
upon our present conduct ; his words go 
in their immediate aim straight to men's 
consciences and hearts. His teachings are 
indeterminate, and stop, and leave our 
questions unanswered where we are still too 
young to understand God's eternal coun- 
sels, — and we are now too young to under- 
stand them ; where also further revelations 
might only serve to confuse conscience. 
There is enough about the possibilities of 
future destiny in the Bible for our imme- 
diate use and profit. There is not enough 
revealed to justify so much hard contro- 
versy over it. What part of your belief 
in the eternal life belongs to your real 
faith ? That part of it which you put now 
to some use in just dealing, patience, god- 
liness, and true-heartedness. We would 
like to know much more than any man 
knows concerning the future conditions 
of souls, and God's eternal judgments. 



176 PEBSONAL CREEDS. 

But what we need much more just now 
is not to peer far off into eternity, but to 
have the Eternal Righteousness and Love 
get unmistakable hold of us. And that is 
what Jesus in his teaching was always try- 
ing to do for men, to bring every man he 
met under some felt power of the eternal 
life. Jesus was always holding up before 
men's thought of the hereafter, the divine 
eternal Right which surely shall be done, 
and the eternal Goodness which loving 
hearts can trust. Jesus took the pure, 
fast colors of men's present lives, — such 
as justice, mercy, truth, sympathy, service, 
pity, fairness, — and with these simple, 
yet enduring colors, he could depict, as 
occasion required, the rewards and punish- 
ments of the future world, and God's eter- 
nal judgments. And at the centre of 
Jesus' thought of eternal things, diffusing 
its light over all his solemn teaching, was 
the presence of the holy Fatherhood of 
God. 

Following this method of Jesus, not 
venturing too far from it, we surely are led 
through present moral experiences which 



PRACTICAL RETRIBUTION. 177 

contain implications of future rewards and 
punisliments. We can see that sin by its 
nature hastens to torment. Wickedness 
plays even here with God's flame. In this 
world moral chasms open and grow wide 
and deep between the good and the evil. 

In our human homes love will forgive 
and be patient, but it cannot endure undis- 
turbed and unvisited sin. Love is too 
pure and holy ever to make selfishness 
perfectly happy. The near, earthly ends 
of this truth of divine retributions are 
fearful enough to make us dread further 
and final consequences of utter impeni- 
tence. All that we now know of good 
and evil confirms conscience in its jjrophesy- 
ings of possible future retributions. We 
cannot take our Lord's awful parable from 
its moral contacts with our human expe- 
rience of sin and its results. 

In some further relations and applica- 
tions of the future life to the present, this 
method of approach to this doctrine needs 
to be carried in a concluding sermon. I 
have been speaking to-day almost entirely 
of the darker, retributive nature of the 



178 PERSONAL CREEDS. 

future, which constitutes a part, althotigh 
the lesser part, of Jesus' teaching; there 
are also some portions of our present expe- 
rience which are in vital contact with 
happier eternal truths. I leave this subject 
accordingly now unfinished. Yet to for- 
bid any of those misunderstandings which 
are most apt to arise where our faith 
searches for the spaces of light amid the 
shadows of revelation, let it at this time 
be distinctly said that the method of 
thought which I have sought to follow 
into this as into other truths, belongs itself 
to no "ism," and declines to be called by 
any name. It is simply the desire and the 
effort to go back to the human reality and 
simplicity of Jesus' wisdom in his way 
with us men. I would rather gain for 
myself, I would rather a thousand times 
lead some other man into a profound sense 
and conviction of the worth of a soul, and 
the tremendous possibilities that lie before 
it on its endless way, than be able to per- 
suade the whole intellect of Christendom 
to assent to some word of doctrine or 
speculation which may seem to me reason- 



PRACTICAL RETKIBUTION. 179 

able or Scriptural concerning the woiicl- 
ages to come. For to succeed in doing 
the former would be to imitate the Lord 
Christ in his moral teaching concerning 
the hereafter. Surely, surely, whatever 
our questionings or our ideas about the 
conditions of souls hereafter, or God's final 
disposition of our human history of sin, 
the fact that we are to live on and on, and 
that the only moral salvation worthy of 
God's giving or our finding is salvation 
from sin, and that now is opportunity for 
the beginning of so great salvation, — 
this is practical Bible enough for every 
man to take hold of, and put to immediate 
personal use. There is warning fearful 
enough, and true enough to present life, in 
our Lord's parable from the world to come, 
to make a man's soul shudder at the thought 
of becoming possessed with any lust ; and 
at all the quick and sensitive points of our 
human conscience and heart, we may feel, 
and we should grow more and more con- 
scious of, the grand, awful, glad, inspiring 
motive-powers of the world to come. 



( 



VIII. 

POINTS OF CONTACT 

BETWEEN THIS LIFE AND THE 

NEXT. 



He that hath ears^ let him hear. — Matt. xiii. 43. 



^ VIII. 

POINTS OF CONTACT BETWEEN THIS 
LIFE AND THE NEXT. 

WE are seeking to find for our per- 
sonal creeds some vital points of 
contact between this life and the life 
beyond. I am aware that this simpler 
method of attempting to lay hold of the 
eternal life by those truths of it which 
may prove apprehensible and verifiable in 
our present experience, may seem some- 
what disappointing and ineffectual to 
persons who have been trained to bolder, 
dogmatic handling of the decrees of the 
Eternal. But Jesus' general method in 
his conversations, as we have been observ- 
ing, seems to have been to bring his heav- 
enly teaching down, and to set it in the 
mid3t of the common experiences of men. 
So, likewise, his doctrine of the future life 
is definite and positive at those points 

183 



184 PERSONAL CREEDS. 

where it appeals directly to a robust con- 
science and a loving heart. It seems pur- 
posely to have been left indefinite, and the 
Lord's speech passes into the silence of 
God, when further words of revelation 
might surpass any power of our present 
experience of life to make them real. 

Our text marks again for us this way of 
Jesus' teaching concerning futurity. "He 
that hath ears, let him hear." That was an 
appeal ^to men which Jesus was accustomed 
to make when he had pointed to some sig- 
nificant fact of nature or of human expe- 
rience. There is a further lesson, he would 
say, to be learned by those who will receive 
it, in that portion of your life. There is 
higher truth involved in that common fact. 
You may hear in that familiar speech of 
life some diviner teaching, if you have ears 
to hear. 

So in the particular conversation of the 
Master in which our text occurs, Jesus had 
drawn from nature with his rapid, free 
hand a suggestive sketch of the future 
growth of his kingdom, and the harvest at 
the end of the world. These are familiar 



POINTS OF COKTACT. 186 

things — the husbandman's sowing, the 
growth and ripening of different seeds, and 
the final separation of the useful from the 
worthless at the harvest-time. And men 
cast the w^aste into the fire. Every garden 
has its bonfire in the autumn. '' He that 
hath ears, let him hear." In these lower 
quite earthly facts and processes discover 
suggestions of the higher laws and prin- 
ciples. Nature is one parable of heaven. 
Find out you may, in the course of human 
life, something of the way of the Eternal. 
Earthly experience holds within it celestial 
influences, if we will note them. Human 
life is itself prophetic. " He that hath 
ears, let him hear." 

Such is Jesus' simple, undogmatic, hu- 
man method of teaching us concerning the 
more heavenly things. Moreover, it will 
help us to understand more soberly the 
whole Biblical doctrine of the world-age to 
come, if we remember that we now stand 
before the New Testament prophecy of the 
second coming of Christ and the end of the 
world in very much the same position as 
that in which the Jews in the seventh cen- 



186 PERSONAL CREEDS. 

tury before Christ stood towards Isaiah's 
prophecies of the first coming of Christ and 
the future Messianic kingdom. If the 
pious Israelite had undertaken to deduce 
from the words of his prophets a definite 
dogmatic creed, precise in every article of 
it, concerning the future coming and king- 
dom of the Messiah, he could hardly have 
helped mistaking greatly the future inten- 
tions of his God. The later scribes, as we 
know, drew from the prophetic Scriptures 
a caricature of the true Messianic kingdom. 
And by the logic of the scribes the Messiah, 
when he came, was rejected and crucified. 
But, on the other hand, there were por- 
tions of the book of Isaiah the prophet, 
which might have been made very true 
and real to the people of Israel. His proph- 
ecies, though undefined in the glow of their 
high Messianic hope, were brought to a 
focus of flame against the sins of the people. 
And the devout Israelite might have cher- 
ished a true Messianic expectation, born of 
his experience of God's dealings with his 
nation, and answering the deepest truth of 
his life, although he could have conceived 



POINTS OF CONTACT. 187 

only imperfect and confused ideas of what 
that coming Messianic world-age should be. 
In very much the same position, I would 
say, do we now stand towards the whole 
New Testament prophecy of the last things. 
Christian teachers who measure Christ's 
words concerning the future, as the scribes 
applied rule and square to their prophets, 
are very likely to become equally mislead- 
ing guides to the kingdom of heaven. A 
book of prophecy has direct moral bearings 
upon the lives of the men to whom it is 
given ; but a book of prophecy, from its 
very nature, cannot, without violence, be 
made over into a body of dogmatics. The 
Christian prophecy of the far, heavenly 
things is not a whole astronomic science, 
but rather is it a mariner's observation of 
the stars, true enough and practical enough 
to keep him from wreck and loss. 

Accordingly we may seek now to ob- 
serve some further points of practical and 
prophetic relation between our present and 
our future life. 

We start thus to explore those sections 
of our human experience which are most 



188 PERSONAL CREEDS. 

significant of our immortality. And I 
think we can most quickly and surely 
reach these immortal portions of our mor- 
tality through the idea of worth. What 
are life's real worths? What is of real 
and abiding value to a man in this present 
life ? The points of worth in life are the 
points of outlook into the heavens. The 
worths of temporal things belong to the 
eternal. If this world and the next world 
are indeed, as we believe, parts of God's 
one realm, then when we discover some- 
thing here which has worth for life, we 
find something which by its intrinsic value 
is treasure for the other world as well as 
for this. For heaven surely cannot be 
poorer than earth. Manhood keeps, while 
it enriches, childhood's good. The king- 
dom of worths then is now and here the 
kingdom of heaven. You see, therefore, 
at once how in this way we may both 
simplify and put upon a strong, fruitful 
principle our many thoughts and inquiries 
concerning the world to come. The sim- 
plest and truest answers to all such inqui- 
ries are contained in those parts of our 



POINTS OF CONTACT. 189 

present life which are of pure Avorth, and 
which therefore as among the final ends 
of being must belong to our future. These 
present goods of our being may be dis- 
tinguished into two classes, those general 
worths of existence which belong to us aj 
men, and those special worths of life which 
may become our individual possessions. 
Let me next, therefore, run over rapidly 
these present prophetic treasures of our 
existence. 

The first fundamental worths of human 
life are given in the kinships, or natural 
relationships, into which we are born. The 
human body is itself a gift of nature to the 
spirit. The human body represents a good 
of the creation which nature has reached 
after ages of the ascent of life towards 
man. This body, therefore, as a thing of 
worth, stands for some eternal, creative 
idea of our God. Embodiment, with all 
this rich contact with the external world 
which we gain through our embodiment, 
means something not only for this life, but 
for all our future. The Christian hope of 
the resurrection lays hold of this worth of 



190 PERSONAL CREEDS. 

embodiment to the perfection of the life of 
the spirit, and without presuming to antic- 
ipate with what body we shall come, rests 
in the belief that the soul, once having 
attained to the positive good of embodi- 
ment, shall not in the future be left 
unclothed, but shall be clothed upon with 
some bodily perfection. In other words, 
personal life on this earth has received 
this double good of soul and body, and the 
next world cannot be poorer than this 
world. Heaven shall hold not less, but 
richer life than earth. Without dwelling, 
however, upon this good of life for all 
time for which the body stands, I wish to 
speak more particularly of those natural 
relationships which constitute so much of 
the present value of life to us. 

The human family in its natural good 
belongs to the kingdom of worths, and 
therefore to the kingdom of heaven. A 
true human home is a thing of worth, and 
therefore, in some form of it, a thing to be 
forever. The logic of this faith is short, 
but it goes straightforward. If one chooses 
to deny any continuation of our life beyond 



POINTS OF CONTACT. 191 

the grave, then of course the Avorth of the 
family-life also returns in his unbelief to 
dust and ashes. Death will then be re- 
garded as the robber of life which steals 
this family treasure also of our being. 

But the Christian cannot believe in the 
continued existence of the soul as some- 
thing of immortal worth in God's creation, 
and at the same time denude that future 
existence of any intrinsic good which be- 
longs now to human nature. This is only 
saying that while the seed contains poten- 
tially the fruit, the fruit must fulfil the 
seed. So that our Christian belief in the 
resurrection carries with it whatever in 
present existence is of natural worth. Now 
the first organic good of human life is given 
in the relationships of the family-life. The 
original sacredness of human life is not the 
baptism of the church, but the birth of a 
spirit into the human family. And we 
have no pure and perfect reverence for the 
family-life if we look upon it as wholly of 
this earth earthy. Fatherhood is the re- 
vealed nature of the Godhead. The infin- 
itely blessed life of God, according to the 



192 PERSO]S^AL CREEDS. 

intimations of the Scriptures, is not soli- 
tude, but communion ; and the partial, 
haif-intelligible, yet real symbol for the 
perfect being of the infinite One is given 
to us in the Bible tlirough the human rela- 
tionship of fatherhood and sonship. The 
human family, therefore, is itself part and 
portion of man's Godlikeness ; the sacred 
intimacy and perfectness of the life of a 
true human family is copy and image of 
something whose original and prototype 
exists in the eternal being of God himself. 
What is thus not altogether earth-born, 
shall not end wholly in dust and ashes. 

In our century's literature of faith, shad- 
owed by doubt, there is a pathetic passage, 
to which Mr. Martineau has lately referred, 
which discloses how greatly our eager 
human grief has need of the healing touch 
of this truth of the immortal worth of that 
life which may spring up in a true human 
home. In a letter which has been pre- 
served in the memorials of Schleiermach- 
er's life, Henriette von Willich, who had 
been suddenly bereft of her husband, opens 
to her friend the contending hope and de- 



POINTS OF CONTACT. 193 

spair of her grief in such touching words 
as these : 

" O Schleier, in the midst of my sorrow 
there are yet blessed moments when I 
vividly feel what a love ours was, and that 
surely this love is eternal, and it is impos- 
sible that God can destroy it; for God him- 
self is love." But another moment the 
loneliness and the cold darkness are too 
great and deep for the woman's sore heart. 
" Do you know when it is that I feel the 
grasp of the sorrow too bitterly? It is 
when I think. In the future the old will 
count for nothing, ... ' His soul is re- 
solved back, — quite melted away in the 
great All ; the old will never come to rec- 
ognition again — it is quite gone by ' — ■ O 
Schleier, this I cannot bear ! Oh, speak to 
me, dear ! " And Schleiermacher, who was 
then gazing into the golden haze of the 
prospect of a life absorbed in the divine, 
could bring back from Spinoza's pantheism 
but little solace for that passion and prayer 
of personal life. Had our Christ but been 
there to speak to that woman's grief one 
of his words of the eternal life, would not 



194 PERSOi^AL CEEEDS. 

he have answered from his knowledge of 
the Father, and made happily sure of itself 
against all doubt and darkness of death, 
this true prophetic instinct of that woman's 
heart, — '' Surely this love is eternal, and 
it is impossible that God can destroy it ; 
for God himself is love." He has said, " I 
came that they may have life, and may 
have it abundantly." That future life 
would be life far less abounding, if "the 
old is quite gone by " ; if our personal life 
in its richest kinships and companionships 
comes to no further fulfilment ; if the eter- 
nal world does not contain in its comple- 
tions the full and rounded unity of those 
two lives which were once bound together 
on this earth, — that man's life of promise 
which had suddenly passed into the Un- 
seen, and that other life, which had been 
left, of the w^oman who could write thus : 
" I bear this life while nature will, for I 
have still work to do for the children, his 
and mine ; but O God ! Avith what long- 
ing, what foreshadowing of unutterable 
blessedness, do I gaze across into that world 
where he lives ! What joy for me to die ! 



I 



POINTS OF CONTACT. 195 

Schleier, shall I not find him again? " " O 
how is this poor heart drawn hither and 
thither by hope and presentiment — and 
doubt. But no ; the doubt does not go 
much further than into the thoughts — this 
I feel as an eternal comfort, which does 
not vanish from me, our love was godlike, 
death cannot destroy it. . . . The last 
word which he said to me, when I asked 
him, if he did not know his Jette, was, 
'Yes, Jette, my sweet bride.' O Schleier, 
how significant and how true ; his bride, 
that I am." So human love, saying I am, 
declares its immortality. 

But among words of sympathy for his 
friend's first grief, Schleiermacher could 
bring from the philosophy of the Monologues^ 
which he had been teaching her husband 
and herself, only this disappointing solace : 
'' There is no death, no destruction for the 
spirit. But personal life is not of the es- 
sence of the spirit, it is only an appear- 
ance." Twenty-seven years afterwards, 
nearly, Schleiermacher, the profound phi- 
losopher, the great theologian, lay upon 
his death-bed, and this same Henriette von 



196 PEESOXAL CEEEDS. 

Willich, whom he had made his wife, min- 
istered to him in his death. He gave to 
her then the cup of the communion of the 
Christ, repeating almost with his last 
breath the words of institution, and mth 
a simpler yet deeper faith he said, '' In 
this love and communion we are and we 
remain one." Schleiermacher's last Word 
at that hour when he died, was the truest 
answer of life to love ; for only in personal 
being is spirit realized, and personal life is 
realization of the very essence of spirit, 
and not mere appearance. Our personal 
lives in each other and for one another 
mean something forever. 

These first sacred words of our present 
world — father, mother, brother, sister, hus- 
band, mfe, children — are words that sig- 
nify relations of permanent worth in our 
human life, and they signify therefore 
something for our immortality. And if we 
will not be impatient to bring the fulfil- 
ments of these holy Scriptures of our 
human nature down now to our too defi- 
nite interpretation, as those Sadducees 
tried in vain to persuade Jesus to do, but 



POINTS OF CONTACT. 197 

if we are content simply to read in these 
most human worths of life God's promises 
of future good, we may find at these vital 
points, in these quick affections, a wonder- 
fully inspiring and assuring hope of our 
immortality. So an apostle, going back 
perhaps in his memory to his childhood 
in his free home at Tarsus, laid hold with 
one single firm touch upon the future life 
when he wrote, '' I bow my knees unto the 
Father, from whom every family in heaven 
and on earth is named." 

Around this inner circle of good which 
is secured in our most sacred personal rela- 
tionships, widens the larger circle of the 
communal life. Men exist in communi- 
ties. Human friendships belong also to 
the kingdom of worths, and therefore to 
the kingdom of heaven. The mutual obli- 
gations of men in a neighborhood, the 
opportunities of reciprocal helpfulness in 
a community, the many human inter-de- 
pendencies of the city, are not mere acci- 
dents of existence ; they grow from the 
trunk of our human life, and in their 
fruitfulness constitute no little of its daily 



198 PERSONAL CREEDS. 

good, without which no life could be so 
richly worth living. And in the Bible the 
blessed angels go in companies, and sing 
in hosts ; and there were three other-world 
strangers whom Abraham, shading his eyes, 
saw at noontime before the door of his tent. 
The primitive Biblical idea of immortality 
was not the thought of a solitary prolon- 
gation of individual life, but rather the 
hope of continued family existence and 
the perpetuation forever of the people of 
Israel. Social immortality forms the Bib- 
lical basis for the later, fully developed 
truth of individual immortality. And the 
last chapters of the Bible, with all their 
added wealth of revelation, remain still 
simply and profoundly true to that primi- 
tive Hebrew conception of social immor- 
tality, for St. John saw " the holy city, new 
Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven 
from God." 

That idea of social immortality is woven 
through the whole warp and woof of the 
Biblical prophecy of the kingdom of heaven. 
Even St. Paul, who possessed a marked and 
thoroughly independent individuality, and 



POINTS OF CONTACT. 199 

who might have expected, if any man 
could, to go on and on by himself in the 
future life, does not think of knowing God 
as a solitary communicant, but prays that, 
" with all the saints," we may apprehend 
the love of Christ. That is the only way 
in which the Divine Love in its fulness 
can be known by any man, — " with all 
the saints." 

Here, then, in the friendships and reci- 
procities of the community, is a broad circle 
of present life which also opens heaven- 
ward. The city contains its implications 
of immortality. Heaven is the city of God. 
One may exercise his imagination as he 
pleases in the endeavor to conceive possi- 
ble future forms for the perfection of com- 
munities of men. Every star, for aught 
we know, may form one of heaven's future 
villages, every constellation be some re- 
splendent city of God. Imagination in 
things spiritual will do us no harm. It 
may sometimes prove healthful and stimu- 
lating, if we do not insist in turning the 
poetry of our faith into dogmatic prose 
to be imposed on our own or otliers' 



200 PERSONAL CREEDS. 

minds. But whatever may be our best 
available forms for representing the future 
life of souls in communities, this present 
substantial truth of the worth of our human 
life of friendliness and mutuality offers 
another real point of experience, by means 
of which we may lay hold of the eternal 
life. What the children in that city are 
playing in the streets thereof; what the 
men and women are doing in those many 
mansions ; what the studies, the occupa- 
tions, the comradeships of high endeavor 
there can be, — we may not conceive ; but 
a life of mutuality and reciprocity, a life 
of comradeships, it has already entered 
into the heart of man to know, and to 
know as worthy of him, and as good for 
all the ages. And by this known worth 
of life, I Avould reach forward, and appre- 
hend eternal things. 

Our thought moves now towards a far 
wider realm. The last circumference of 
our individual life is not our family, our 
community, nor even our generation ; it 
is the whole of humanity. We belong to 
a human race. And this race-connection. 



POINTS OF CONTACT. 201 

likewise, has its worth. This human order 
of beings has its truth and good. The 
human type is one of God's eternal ideas. 
There is, therefore, something in human- 
ity which is destined for everlasting per- 
petuation. As one whole, humanity is 
going towards the last judgment. This 
first truth of the solidarity of humanity 
underlies the Biblical teaching concerning 
man, and is constantly coming to the sur- 
face in different texts ; but in our beliefs 
and discussions of the questions concern- 
ing the last things, this elemental Biblical 
truth is strangely overlooked. For we 
often think and speak as though our des- 
tiny were to be settled individually, and 
we were to reach our final state, each man 
of us for himself, without reference to the 
fate of the whole humanity, to which every 
man belongs. So under our too narrow 
and hard beliefs we would pulverize God's 
human purpose into atoms, and destroy 
the worth of humanity as one created 
whole, and lose the divine idea of the re- 
demption of a lost race. Consequently we 
can think of each soul as going immedi- 



202 PERSONAL CREEDS. 

ately after death to the final judgment, 
and reaching the eternal state, as though 
the man did not belong after death, as much 
as before death, to our human race, and 
could find his final place and perfection 
regardless of God's whole purpose and last 
judgment for us all. So we lose our grasp 
on these most human portions of the fut- 
*ure life, — the truths, namely, that the 
individual life is bound up with the whole 
of humanity, and waits for the general 
resurrection and last judgment for its eter- 
nal completions ; that God's harvest is the 
end of the world, and not the death of the 
individual ; that Moses and Elias, and an 
the worthies who died centuries ago, as 
the Scripture at the close of that triumphal 
chapter of Hebrews puts it, are not to be 
made perfect ''apart from us"; that the 
generations of men belong together, and go 
together towards the end, and shall come 
out together at the last great day ; that all 
individuals shall find equal right and privi- 
lege of law and gospel in God's one con- 
clusion of our common human history ; 
that no man's human life can with any 



POINTS OF CONTACT. 203 

truth be regarded as ended at his death, 
but can be concluded only in God's final 
completion of the whole volume of the 
history of our Avorld. 

There are, it is true, judgments for the 
individual, judgments of men preliminarj^ 
and preparatory for the final human judg- 
ment. Crises come to men in their lives, 
and epochs to nations in their history. 
Life prepares for us hours of special trial 
and moral determination. And death, like- 
wise, as the great change in the course of 
life, may bring souls to judgment. No 
man, we may well believe, can pass through 
the mysterious experience of dying with- 
out its leaving some deep and permanent 
effect upon him. We may conceive of 
such experience of death as the beginning 
of the end for the individual soul. But it 
cannot be the end itself, for we are men, 
and once having been born into humanity, 
we cannot die out of humanity ; — om^ in- 
dividual lives are bound up with our hu- 
man destiny. We have Scripture for it, 
that the harvest is the end of the world. 
Until then growth is not necessarily 



204 PERSONAL CREEDS. 

stopped, nor moral processes suspended. 
While our world-age waits for its consum- 
mation, no man, whose life began in any 
age of its history, can be said to have 
reached the end and last judgment of his 
human existence. Our humanity as one 
organic whole can be no fiction to the God 
who made it, or to the Christ who took 
away the sin of the world. Nor should 
we ignore our oneness with our race in our 
personal hope of the hereafter, although 
we can but dimly discern its purport and 
its destiny. Distant ages, and the children 
of all times, are bound together in the one 
eternal purpose of creation and redemption. 
Several hundred years before Christ 
there lived a ragged, worthless, idolatrous 
Amalekite. He with his whole tribe had 
to be cleared away from the earth that 
Israel might have a free space in which to 
breathe pure air. But that Amalekite was 
a man, and he belongs to humanity ; and 
he and his tribe have part and lot in the 
whole history and redemption of human- 
ity. Here in a Christian home eighteen 
centuries after Christ a child is born, and 



POINTS OF CONTACT. 205 

baptized in the name of the Father. That 
child lives a brief moment, and God takes 
it. That child of the Christian home be- 
longs likewise to humanity, and its eternal 
future is bound up in the whole history 
and redemption of humanity. God holds 
both those lives, and all the centuries of 
life between, in his one eternal purpose in 
Christ Jesus. 

God's thought comprehends the human 
whole. God's education of this world is a 
race-education. And Christ died for the 
world. He is the Head over all. God 
means something, therefore, for the human 
race in eternity. What then, do you ask, 
follows from this for our present grasp on 
the doctrine of the eternal life? Very little, 
I acknowledge, if Ave wish to understand 
precisely how God is to deal with each 
and every individual in his relations to the 
whole history and final judgment of hu- 
manity. Very little, if we wish to antici- 
pate God's dispositions in eternity for our 
human race. But much, very much, fol- 
lows from recognition of this solidarity of 
our humanity and its worth, when we are 



206 PERSONAL CREEDS. 

trying, in spite of the injustice of human 
history and a thousand temporal inequali- 
ties, to keep our faith in the Christian 
Being of our God, and the perfect human- 
ness of his last judgment. Very much 
for the peace and the power of faith in the 
eternal righteousness follows, if we will 
hold fast to these nearer earthly parts 
of the revelation of the final judgment; 
namely, that all men shall appear together 
as one human Avhole before the Son of 
man ; that God shall not deal with any 
man simply as an individual happening to 
have been born here or there, under such 
advantages or disadvantages of temporal 
conditions, but that He is to deal with us 
all as men belonging to one race of men, 
entitled by birthright to all good that is 
essentially human, and in his Christian 
purpose for the world predestined also to 
all that God may do to save any man ; — 
each and every man of us, howsoever born, 
or living at whatever period in the ages of 
our human history, related by his human 
birth to the Christ of humanity, and not 
to be forsaken or cast out from our human 



POINTS OF CONTACT. 207 

heritage of law and grace save as by a 
man's own sin against the Holy Ghost, he 
shall dehumanize and destroy himself. 

I cannot tell, no man may know, how to 
that Amalekite who died and who has been 
waiting in Sheol these ages for the end of 
the world, and to that Christian child who 
went with the name of Christ on its infant 
forehead to the love of God beyond, the 
Creator shall be equally just and merciful ; 
nor how with equal will to forgive all that 
is forgivable, and to save all that can be 
saved, the power of God's love shall be 
brought to bear to the uttermost on all 
the children of all the generations of men 
before the end of the world. But, though 
in these far spaces the heavenly truths re- 
main high above our reason's reach, they 
are brought down to our moral grasp in 
these nearer apprehensions of them, that 
God loved the world; that Christ is the 
Son of man, related by his incarnation to all 
humanity ; that he tasted death for every 
man ; that his gospel is to be preached to 
the whole world ; that the harvest is the 
end of the world. And when we once re- 



208 PEPvSOXAL CEEEDS. 

fuse with a holy conscience to let any man 
rob US of this faith in the universal human- 
ity of the Christ, and the eternal purpose 
of the Father for his one created and re- 
deemed ^yhole of humanity; then, although 
many questions may be raised to which we 
can giye but conjectural answer, we shall 
have gained a firm human grasp on God's 
eternal righteousness which cannot be 
shaken, and in holding which we are not 
afraid, nor our hearts troubled. 

In the firm possession of this truth of 
God's eternal purpose for our human race 
as one atoned and forgiven human whole, 
we can go forth to work Christ's works 
for men without feverish hands, and no 
more in the nervousness of almost despair- 
ing hearts, but with calm confidence, and 
in that missionary strength and zeal which 
is inspired and enlarged by some sense of 
our part in God's great love for humanity, 
and his redeeming purpose for the world. 

Then the missionary work of Christ's 
Church for humanity will be put upon a 
higher level of motive, and not be lowered 
to the hard, and seemingly at times almost 



POINTS OF CONTACT. 209 

hopeless, task of saving a few heathen men 
from future punishment. Lifted above the 
doubts which lie so thick on the lower 
plains of motive, delivered from that despair 
of the world which might paralyze the 
heart of missions, invigorated and expanded 
to a healthful and manful love for all men, 
the faith of the Church in its Christ and his 
power for the mastery of human life, will go 
from strength to strength ; it will not lack 
hands to work and feet to run, at home or 
on foreign shores, wherever God's human 
opportunities open. The hope of the 
Church for all men will be some clearer 
and purer vision of that thought of our 
whole humanity which from eternity to 
eternity lies in the infinite heart of our 
God, — that divine thought for our human- 
ity which was in the bosom of the Father 
and is brought near to us in the Son of his 
love. 

I leave to your private thoughts the 
further discovery in individual experiences 
of points of contact between our present 
and our future life. Suffice it to say that 
each man in his special talent, his personal 



210 PERSONAL CREEDS. 

training, liis individual discipline, or liis 
peculiar trial, may find the more definite 
points of attachment of his life to eternal 
things. The simple illuminative principle 
is this : take the idea of any worth in your 
life which you may nobly seek after, and 
let that shine as a great light before you, 
not loAv down on these earthly horizons 
merely, but far and away as a serene hope 
for voiu' endless li^inof. 



Typography by J- S- Gushing & Co., Boston. 
Presswork bv Benvick & Smith, Boston, 



